281–290 of 554 posts
Why on earth would someone buy this instead of a regular PC setup, especially at that price point? There's no way I would pay that sort of money and not be able to change out the GPU and RAM, and also only have a single PCIE 4x slot.
If you want a swappable gpu then a APU isn’t for you
Up to 128 GB RAM available for running AI models. Theoretically awesome, but this might have some interesting market consequences for everyone else.
You’ve gotta deal with amd’s AI software stack though. How is that these days? I assume cuda is still king?
Why this over a traditional ATX work station? The article even points out the motherboard will fit in an ATX case, so size doesn't seem to be the major selling point. For gaming specifically, so many micro ATX motherboards offer Gen 5 PCIe, which can handle a proper video card, double the RAM, and the smaller cases are only slightly larger than this Framework.
I could see myself going for something like this for gaming actually. My gaming needs are pretty tame to the point that my current 3080Ti has been and remains overkill (usually 2+ year old titles @ 2560x1440), and as time has gone on I’ve come to value silence (which the FW Desktop seems good at, overcooling a laptop APU with a single fan desktop cooler) over raw power. In addition, the discrete GPU story continues t…
Between consoles and macs/macbooks, the writing is on the wall and cpu+cpu+unified memory is the future for performance. I will absolutely be looking at buying one of framework desktops instead of building a new PC soon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With what memory bandwidth? Remember, without e.g. speculative decoding you need to read the entire model and KV cache for every token. Let's be extremely generous and say you get 512GB/sec in memory bandwidth, on par with a high end M4 MacBook Pro. This means you can only read the entire DRAM 4 times a second, generating at most 4 tokens per second. Smaller models will of course run proportionally faster, but 128GB…
> With what memory bandwidth? 256GB/sec, so roughly M4 Pro throughput.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The soldered RAM is surprising for Framework, and doubly surprising for being so in a form-factor that usually doesn't have soldered RAM. Similar to what other commenters have expressed, it just seems like they shouldn't have built this product if they couldn't figure out the soldered RAM bit.
That is not a framework choice, that is an AMD architecture that doesn't use regular RAM modules as it requires wider data bus
All that aside, I absolutely can't wait for desktops to decide to go the same route of having 4 memory channels instead of 2. Right now the only way to have >2 channels is to buy workstation/server class stuff or an APU.
Edit: found it, 256 GB/s for the shared memory bandwidth
would have been cool to know about this a month ago i just built a mini ITX gaming PC for a friend, and this one looks pretty good for quality/$. good enough that i wouldn't be surprised if these get snapped up and re-sold for more than the sticker price i think it makes more sense to think of it as a high-end console, given that basically everything is soldered, though
For one thing, the price per FPS for gaming is going to be terrible. This price can get you a serious rig with much better performance.
Gaming is a very specific workload that almost entirely depends on the GPU. It is hard to even purchase a CPU that performs poorly in gaming by accident, or unless you are a hyper-specific type of gamer (like someone who plays e-sports titles and expects 300FPS for optimal reaction time, or someone who plays extremely CPU-intense games like Stellaris).
You don’t want a gaming PC with soldered GPU, even if you are using it as a “console,” even if you prioritize small size. You really want the ability to replace graphics cards because none of the other components important to gaming age out very quickly.
Here are all of the parts in my system that are older than my current graphics card (2024):
- Motherboard
- CPU
- RAM
- Power Supply
- SSD
- Case
- CPU cooler
Here is a list of those parts that are older than my previous graphics card (2020)
- RAM
- Case
- Power Supply
- Motherboard
- SSD
Here is a list of all the components that are older than the prior graphics cards before that! (Year unknown)
- Motherboard
- RAM
- Power Supply
Arguably I didn’t even need to upgrade the CPU, the cooler upgrade was necessitated by the CPU upgrade, and the case upgrade and SSD were both just personal wants and not needs.
Basically everything that matters besides my graphics card has stayed very constant but upgrading the GPU has increased my gaming performance by over 100% in the period I have described.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...the first Framework Laptop 12 motherboard is going to use Intel's 13th-generation Core i3 and i5 processors I _really_ hope they launch an AMD version (perhaps with an iGPU) soon after that. That and preferably with Libreboot support. This would make it the ideal portable laptop for me and thus I'd be able to (finally!) replace my X220T.
Why would you prefer AMD? price, heat/fan noise?
Why this over a traditional ATX work station? The article even points out the motherboard will fit in an ATX case, so size doesn't seem to be the major selling point. For gaming specifically, so many micro ATX motherboards offer Gen 5 PCIe, which can handle a proper video card, double the RAM, and the smaller cases are only slightly larger than this Framework.
Is the audience truly gamers? Presumed this was just poor journalism from ars
So I'd say yes.