I really hope this won't be too expensive. If it's reasonably affordable i might just get one for my living room.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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So... now Framework Corp is selling non-upgradable hardware?
I dunno. Conceptually I want to like Framework. But their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy). But they also have a system that heavily encourages people to horde spare parts rather than just take it to an e-waste disposal facility/bin.
You get fast memory as a result. If you don't care about the fast memory, there's no good reason to buy this, with their motherboard. There's a use case this serves which can't be served by traditional slotted memory and the alternative is to buy 4-5 NVIDIA 3090/4090/5090. If you want that use case, then this is a pretty good deal.
And your phone isn't repairable because it needs to be water proof. Your earbuds because of power efficiency. Etc.
Also, I suggest watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3zB9EFntmA.
But, to be clear: I am actually not as opposed to the idea of soldered ram when you have "an excuse". Same with phones. But framework is a brand that tries to build itself on minimizing e-waste and maximizing repairability and... hey, at least we can still swap out the side panel on their prebuilt!
As far as I read LPCAMM in its current state does not work for this. The electrical noise is too high. These things aren't the same. A repairable waterproof phone can be made without glue by making it a bit thicker. In the case of RAM today, we're hitting fundamental physics limitations with speed of electricity and noise. At this point the physical interconnect itself becomes a problem. Gold contact points become antennas that induce noise into adjacent parts of the system. I'm not trying to excuse Framework here. I'm saying that the difficulty here borders on the impossible. If this RAM was soldered and it had bandwidth no different than SODIMM or LPCAMM modules then I'd say Framework fucked up making it soldered, majorly. As I said, there's no point buying this if you don't care about the fast RAM and use cases that need it like LLMs. Regular ITX board with regular AM5 is the way to go.
E: To be clear, if this bandwidth could be achieved with LPCAMM, then Framework fucked up.
It will be faster than most next-gen laptops, and it's much cheaper than a similarly-specced Asus Z13. Strix Halo uses a quad channel 8533Mhz bus, 2 full Zen CCDs like you find in desktops/servers, and a 40 CU GPU. Its more than twice the size/performance of two true "laptop chips" put together.
Everything except the APU/RAM/Mobo combo is upgradable, and you don't have to replace the whole machine if the board fails.
I mean, if you don't need that kind of compute/RAM, this system is not for you, and old gaming desktops are probably better deals for pure gaming. But this thing has a niche.
Everything except the APU/RAM/Mobo combo is upgradable, and you don’t have to replace the whole machine if the board fails.
So... storage, case, and USB C dongles?
Fans, case, ports, side panel, ...
Whatever you do with a pc, you can do with this.
Just not separately replace ram and cpu because of the cpu design of amd.
Hell, it can be connected to another one to make on hell of a compute monster too.
Oh. Okay. As long as I can replace the side panel.
A PC lets you replace the CPU, ram and plug in multiple pcie cards.
This is less upgradable than the average laptop.
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I think the framework desktop would be an absolute powerhouse as a workstation desktop.
Think developers ( that still use desktops ), people who do raw computational power for science, servers, ai development, ...
No, the pc is upgradable. They explicitly said in the event that the desktop was suppose to be an actual desktop with replaceable parts as much as technically possible. Only ram is tied to the mobo/cpu because of technical limitations of the amd cpu
At least memory is soldered on because of high throughout they say.
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This is a standard a370 mini PC at a high price.
There's Beelink, Minisforum, Aoostar and many others.
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Are they going to at least make memory modules available for those who want to solder their own?
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So can someone who understands this stuff better than me explain how the L3 cache would affect performance? My X3D has a 96 MB cache, and all of these offerings are lower than that.
This has no X3D, the L3 is shared between CCDs. The only odd thing about this is it has a relatively small "last level" cache on the GPU/Memory die, but X3D CPUs are still kings of single-threaded performance since that L3 is right on the CPU.
This thing has over twice the RAM bandwidth of the desktop CPUs though, and some apps like that. Just depends on the use case.
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