Doing a rebuild, and how to start from scratch

The small SATA SSD I used to build my BC-250 got quite full quite quickly and I wanted to get a bigger one, but the price is quite scary nowadays.

Browsing second hand items in the local CEX I saw a 1TB "M.2 SATA SSD" lurking at the back of the display for a decent price. I figured SATA is slower than NVME but almost certainly good enough given the BC-250 only does Gen2 speeds. When I paid they handed me this, which is actually a 1TB NVME Gen4 SSD, so I got a real bargain.

Also this meant it was time for a rebuild and I decided to write down the various tweaks to Bazzite I did in the process. This is all information from other people but is scattered around various GitHub pages and Discord so I'm going to try and link to everything useful here. I'll update it if I find other things.

BIOS Flashing

The default BIOS is not what you want for a gaming system, there are a couple of 'unlocked' images available and I would recommend with using v3.00, using this method. Beware lots of the pages are AI generated so it has some duff information in like the pinouts for the power connector, which caught me out, but this section is OK.

Installing Bazzite

Modern versions of Bazzite will just boot and install, only needing some minor tweaks afterwards. Download an image for a USB stick and flash that stick (16GB+) with Balena Etcher. When you do the download, select the following options.

• Desktop
• AMD (R4xx+ | AI)
• KDE

The final option is whether you want to boot straight into Steam gaming mode and that is probably a good choice if that's the main use for the machine.

Enabling SSH

Many of these later tweaks are done in the terminal and it's very helpful to enable remote access over SSH, so go in to desktop mode from the power menu and open a terminal. Pop in the following...

sudo systemctl enable --now sshd

...you will now be able to log in remotely and do the rest of these setup steps.

NexGen-3D-Printing setup script

One of the very involved people on the Discord has come up with a script to do a set of optimisations and fixes that suit the BC-250 better than the Bazzite defaults. This is around swap size, zram and so on.

There are instructions for doing the all-but-essential GPU overclock in the document and you should work through them to set a level that works for you.

Cooler Control

You will almost certainly want to have some monitoring of temperatures and fans. There's a good section in this page on the subject. Essentially you need to install Cooler control from the terminal...

ujust install-coolercontrol

Beware lots of the pages are AI generated so it has some duff information in like the pinouts for the power connector, which caught me out, but this section is OK.

The first time you run Cooler Control it will tell you the commands you need to type in the terminal to enable its service.

Cooler Control can customize your fan speeds for different temperatures in a more flexible way than the basic BIOS settings, so set your fan to 100% in the BIOS then use Cooler Control to lower it from that. You generally want the "Pump fan" to be running 100% if the GPU gets to 70C but below that you can fiddle with the curve to be cooler or quieter.

ACPI

Bazzite by default doesn't handle the BC-250 ACPI states, again NexGen-3D-Printing has some instructions for fixing this. Even with this idle power efficiency is pretty poor and sleep doesn't really work.

CPU overclock

The main NexGen-3D-Printing script takes you through GPU overclocking but not CPU overclocking. Which is frankly less important but the instructions for this are in the same document as the ACPI info.

Heroic Launcher

If you have games in stores other than Steam, perhaps a library of free games from the Epic Games Store, then you can install these using the Heroic Launcher. Switch to Desktop Mode from the Power menu and it's in the "Bazaar" which is Bazzite's app store.

Look through the settings before you install any games, in there is a tickbox to "add to Steam" and this will make these other games appear in the Steam Launcher once you've added them using Heroic Launcher.