The Framework Desktop is a beast
59 points by shime
59 points by shime
Having built an SFF (small form factor) PC myself for a fraction of the price, I was going to say that it’s a steep price tag. However, given the volume, the performance, and the quietness of Framework Desktop mentioned in the post I think it’s justified.
I had Ryzen 5 3600 in a 7.2L case and the fans were howling under load. Making every part fit was a feat too—it took numerous hours of browsing Reddit to hopefully find a post of someone trying to fit the exact parts I am considering to use.
With that in mind, l don’t think it’s that steep of a price. I am not in a market for a desktop upgrade right now, but when the time comes I’ll definitely take a look at those ready-to-go mini PCs.
The selling point of these CPU is that most of the memory can be dynamically available to the iGPU and is very fast. Like M-series Macs do. So you can run big 70B AI models that even a RTX 5090 cannot.
I was scoping it out for this use, but with 256mbps memory bandwidth, inference would be extremely slow. Same to a lesser extent with M-series: https://github.com/XiongjieDai/GPU-Benchmarks-on-LLM-Inference
So you’re saying that this isn’t that interesting for those of us who couldn’t give a damn about running a chat bot locally
It’s pretty great for gaming! Not that it makes any economic sense right now… but GPD even shoved it into a ridiculous handheld :D
I thought that DHH is promoting beelink, that’s the brand I constantly see on his twitter. I am looking at Framework to be my next machine, and these mini PCs are too good to ignore, stop it DHH, stop giving me alternatives that are too good
He does mention that the beelink SER9 gets you 2/3 the performance at 1/2 the price in this article, and that it’s well worth it if price is a concern.
Jeff Geerling mentioned that Beelink are doing some pretty strong promotion to influencers.
Or, at least I took it that way. I appreciate the transparency so I’m taking a lot of beelink discourse with a grain of salt until real people have them.
interesting, I wasn’t aware of it, thanks for mentioning!
I doubt DHH got paid, he got plenty of money and he is the only guy I’ve heard about Beelink from. Maybe he got a few devices for free, who knows. I’ve no idea how good beelink is tbh.
Anyone know what its power consumption looks like under idle/load? Also, can I configure this thing for automatic reboot (in case it loses power)?
I posted this link yesterday, to Jeff Geerling’s benchmarks of a 4-board cluster. He included some power stats in that review:
For individual nodes, sleep power draw is around 2W, idle power draw 11W, and full-bore, it’ll pull around 150W. It goes into a higher turbo boost momentarily but will settle in around 145-155W for extended maxed-out benchmarks, at least on the CPU side. All my measurements were done at the wall and while running Fedora 42 (or in some cases, Rawhide, the in-development version of Fedora).
Check review and benchmarks done by Phoronix, Level1Tech and Ars Technica. They all released their results of Framework Desktop this week.
But I’ve found that all these computers feel fast enough in single-core performance these days. I can’t actually feel the difference browsing…
Can’t argue with that. Ever since the jump to M1, I’ve felt no impulse to upgrade during app use. Only batch compute jobs could noticeably improve.
it’s because we are power users, I swear my mom and my wife get load any laptop I give them in under a month. 200 open tabs, 30 apps running simultaneously. If you stop being in engineering mode, you can feel amount of resources modern apps need.
I’ve been buying the cheapest macbooks personally for the last decade and I did everything on them, including k8s clusters experiments, however if I stop thinking about resource consumptions - I do need more resources, more than most of the laptops can give me.
Are there any other standard format boards that use this mobile chip? I’ve long thought that using mobile chips in desktop machines was an undertapped market.
There should be more coming. I got the impression (from the livestream in February) that Framework had some kind of “partnership” agreement with AMD that let them get out front on this one.
I found a couple others using these AI chips when looking earlier, from brands I don’t know and for roughly the same price.
I think without the «quiet fans + top mobile chip» double condition it has long been a market where you can just go buy something reasonable, available in stock, ships the day after tomorrow from within your continent, no?
I have recently decided to buy refurbished this time, and easily found a miniPC (Morefine in my case) with Ryzen 5900HX and non-soldered RAM (which I upgraded to 64GiB), and not much thicker than my old large Thinkpad. I have previously owned a slightly thicker/higher bought-new Gigabyte Brix with i7-4770R. And both times I saw reasonable offers with lower tier CPUs. I am not sure there is more to tap!
Now, if Framework managed to keep it quiet under max load, maybe this has been relatively under-served. Not sure, I have preferred geometric volume over sound volume both times.
There are a number of mini-pcs out or coming. A quick Google turned up:
Minis-forum has a few ITX MBs with previous gen CPUs:
https://store.minisforum.com/en-ca/collections/motherboard
The other one that kind of interested was the HP workstation but it’s extremely expensive even compared to the Framework.
On reflection, the price is not too bad. $2450 (all in CAD) (MB only). It includes 128G of Ram (200-400?) and a decent-ish GPU ($200-$400?) and a cooler (you do need to supply a fan though) so board and CPU is about $1650-$1950 compare to a decent ITX board ($200-$400)and a 9950x ($800-$1000) so $1000-$1400 all in so a bit of a price premium, but not so much and it will be more efficient.
First gen is quite cursed.
e.g. Non-ECC memory, CPU cannot sustain boost due to poor cooling, audio front panel header exists but it is not broken out on the case, despite having those fancy decorative front tiles.
Maybe in a gen or two. Hopefully RISC-V by then.