This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
and more at people who want the smallest, most powerful desktop they can build
Well, there's this:
Yeah, the screw holes didn't fit, that's why. And the cooler didn't fit the case, obviously. And the original cooler not the CPU's turbo. It's fine, it still runs most games in 3k on the iGPU.
The bowing on that board makes me think it’s not much longer for this world.
I feel like this is a big miss by framework. Maybe I just don't understand because I already own a Velka 3 that i used happily for years and building small form factor with standard parts seems better than what this is offering. Better as in better performance, aesthetics, space optimization, upgradeability - SFF is not a cheap or easy way to build a computer.
The biggest constraint building in the sub-5 liter format is GPU compatibility because not many manufacturers even make boards in the <180mm length category. Also can't go much higher than 150-200 watts because cooling is so difficult. There are still options though, i rocked a PNY 1660 super for a long time, and the current most powerful option is a 4060ti. Although upgrades are limited to what manufacturers occasionally produce, it is upgradeable, and it is truly desktop performance.
On the CPU side, you can physically put in whatever CPU you want. The only limitation is that the cooler, alpenfohn black ridge or noctua l9a/l9i, probably won't have a good time cooling 100+ watts without aggressive undervolting and power limits. 65 watts TDP still gives you a ryzen 7 9700x.
Motherboards have the SFF tax but are high quality in general. Flex ATX PSUs were a bit harder to find 5 or 6 years ago but now the black 600W enhance ENP is readily available from Velkase's website. Drives and memory are completely standard. m.2 fits with the motherboard, 2.5in SATA also fits in one of the corners. Normal low profile DDR5 is replaceable / upgradeable.
What framework is releasing is more like a laptop board in a ~4 liter case and I really don't like that in order to upgrade any part of CPU, GPU or memory you have to replace the entire board because it's soldered on APU and not socketed or discrete components. Framework's enclosure hasn't been designed to hold a motherboard+discrete GPU and the board doesn't have a PCIe slot if you wanted to attach a card via riser in another case. It could be worse but I don't see this as a good use of development resources.
This is one stupid product. It really goes against everything the framework brand has identified with.
Now, can we have a cool European company doing similar stuff? At the rate it's going I can't decide whether I shouldn't buy American because I don't want to support a fascist country or because I'm afraid the country might crumble so badly that I can't count on getting service for my device.
Much like their laptops, I'm all for the idea, but what makes this desirable by those of us with no interest in AI?
I'm out of that loop though I get that AI is typically graphics processing heavy, can this be taken advantage of with other things like video rendering?
I just don't know exactly what an AI CPU such as the Ryzen AI Max offers over a non-AI equivalent processor.
There is a massive push right now for energy efficient alternatives to nvidia GPUs for AI/ML. PLENTY of companies are dumping massive amounts of money on macs and rapidly learning the lesson the rest of us learned decades ago in terms of power and performance.
The reality is that this is going to be marketed for AI because it has an APU which, keeping it simple, is a CPU+GPU. And plenty of companies are going to rush to buy them for that and a very limited subset will have a good experience because they don't have time sensitive operations.
But yeah, this is very much geared for light-moderate gaming, video rendering, and HTPCs. That is what APUs are actually good for. They make amazing workstations. I could also see this potentially being very useful for a small business/household local LLM for stuff like code generation and the like but... those small scale models don't need anywhere near these resources.
As for framework being involved: Someone has kindly explained to me that even though you have to replace the entire mobo to increase the amount of memory, you can still customize your side panels at any moment so I guess that is fitting the mission statement.
There's lots of workstation niches that are gated by VRAM size, like very complex rendering, scientific workloads, image/video processing... It's not mega fast, but basically this can do things at a reasonable speed that you'd normally need a $20K+ computer to even try. Like, if something takes hours on an A6000 Ada or an A100, just waiting overnight on one of these is not a big deal. Cashing or failing to launch on a 4090 or 7900 XTX is.
That aside, the IGP is massively faster than any other integrated graphics you'll find. It's reasonably power efficient.
