i’m already tired of people losing their minds over the soldered ram, as if it was in framework’s control or that socketed ram could even compare to this… modular ram at this spec is coming but it isn’t ready for this generation of chips. if you don’t have a need for the insane vram just don’t buy it, or get the case and build your own standard ITX system. no one else is providing this chipset to desktop users or running at its full tdp and framework made it available, i cannot find the problem.
I thought their whole mindset was repairability and upgradeability. This is just an all in one board with a case. With a starting price of $1,000 even comparable Mac mini’s are $300 less if you want performance or just get a console if you want to play games.
Would have loved if their desktop would have just rehoused the 13 or 16 motherboards with upgraded cooling potential and even maybe thunderbolt to GPU adapters
or just get a console if you want to play games
No. Consoles are just glorified DRM machines.
This computer is not a gaming machine (as they falsely advertised), because you can definitely get both more powerful and more upgradeable for less.
It is exclusively an AI computer. Its whole advantage is to provide massive high bandwidth memory. It serves only that purpose and it serves it amazingly well. For anyone else, it is not a good value proposition. But in the AI space, this machine is a fantastic value. There is nothing else out there with 128GB that even comes close in price. An RTX 5090 has 32GB and costs 2000 USD alone, without any other component. The nvidia digits probably won’t have 128GB and certainly not at that price.
This competes against Apple’s computers with their HBM where people run LLM lovally and it does it using many more standardized components and with a much more reasonable price.
This machine serves a niche exclusively and I don’t blame anyone for dismissing it, but it’s because it serves a very specific use case for which there is little to no alternatives.
Edit: yes the nvidia digits will have 128GB of shared memory, with 1 petaflops of int4 compute, source nvidia: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-blackwell-on-every-desk-and-at-every-ai-developers-fingertips starting at 3000 USD.
Soldered CPU on a desktop: DOA.
SOLDERED RAM ON A DESKTOP: lol. Lmao even. What the fuck. What ever happened to “you should be able to fix your stuff”? Their laptops have user-replaceable ram btw. This is a joke.
I pre-ordered the 128GB SKU in the second wave. Soldered RAM doesn’t matter to me if I am already maxing out what the platform is capable of. If I can dynamically configure the memory allocation between the CPU and GPU, this will be an extremely potent little AI workstation. I’ll be able to cancel the pre-order of things aren’t what I expect, and it isn’t much of a loss for me ($100 refundable deposit).
I do agree that this branching away from Framework’s roots, but I am still very happy that they are doing interesting things. I’ve always thought that what Minisforum has been doing with their SFF workstations has awesome, so I’m glad to see other companies wading into the same space.
What ever happened to “you should be able to fix your stuff”?
the CPU has such a high memory bandwidth, that it wasn’t possible to used socketed ram. Signal integrity was not holding up.
They tried to get it to run with socketed ram
