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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

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.

jsheard 2y ago
The main selling point is the unified memory, the GPU isn't as fast as a discrete GPU but it can address quadruple the RAM of the biggest consumer dGPU. It'll be good for inference if the software stack works.
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Is the audience truly gamers? Presumed this was just poor journalism from ars
- arp242 2y ago
  It's billed as "Massive gaming capability, heavy-duty AI compute, and standard PC parts, all in 4.5L." on the Framework website. And then further below it has "All the power to play all the games." And it has a dedicated "Gaming" tab with benchmarks and stuff. So I'd say yes.
- currymj 2y ago
  their marketing photos include 1) a game controller next to the PC, 2) a bottle of Bawls soda next to the PC, so I think so.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
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 to escalate to all-new levels of eye-wateringly expensive stupidity which makes me not want to buy any discrete GPU until Nvidia and AMD bring their prices back down to earth and that whole mess with the new Nvidia power connector is properly resolved, and that’s to say nothing about the unstoppable creep of GPU size, heat, and power consumption. If I could sell my full size gaming tower and replace it with an effortlessly inaudible yet reasonably powerful air cooled SFF box, I might just do it. In all truth I could probably get by fine with this first gen Framework desktop, but it would make more sense to wait for a second or third gen where the APU's graphical power comes into the range of upper-tier RTX 3000 cards so I don’t need to use framegen as a crutch for decent framerates.
- Agingcoder 2y ago
  I agree with the point about noise. I’ve been looking for a powerful, compact and silent gaming pc for a while ( with silent then compact being more important than powerful ). I don’t need a laptop - a Mac mini-like or slightly bigger box is good enough . When I look around, gaming pcs are mostly about big and visible, sometimes reasonably silent, almost never compact, inconspicuous and silent. To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet. Since I have so far failed in my quest, I now use GeForce Now from my Mac mini which is a good approximation of what I want.
  - skyyler 2y ago
    >To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet. Because the market you describe has very heavy expectations, and very exacting taste. (And critically, the capability of building one themselves.)
    - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
      > (And critically, the capability of building one themselves.) Kind of but not really. Any SFF build that’s anywhere close to similar in size and capabilities to the Framework is probably going to be making considerably more noise, even with an AIO liquid cooler.
- lelandbatey 2y ago
  Just a note that the GPU in this, while quite good, is still basically a midrange laptop GPU. It seems to be a tad bit better than an RTX 2060 but worse than any Nvidia card sold at a higher tier than that. You're right that's probably fine for most folks though. For folks building a gaming PC though, a RTX 4060 will probably be pretty great.
- seanalltogether 2y ago
  This is exactly where I'm at now. I honestly don't care about PC upgradability anymore. I buy a new cpu, motherboard, memory and gpu all at once, and I'd be more then happy to just buy it all as one integrated unit. And fan noise is also a BIG deal for me. 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.
sliken 2y ago
Small, quiet, and more energy efficient is a good start. I also saw that while it competed well with a 4070 at average frame rates, that the 1% lows were twice as fast. The speculation I saw was that the 12GB vram limit was causing issues on the Nvidia side. Having twice the bandwidth, dynamically allocated VRAM, and very decent cores seems like a solid workhouse that it's more about better worst case performance (when you are heavily cache missing or running out of vram). Sure some will buy a top of the line CPU from Intel or AMD, buy a larger case, and buy a RTX 5080 or 5090, for the 98% of the rest this strix halo will be plenty and will use less power, create less noise, and generate less heat.

jsheard 2y ago

The main selling point is the unified memory, the GPU isn't as fast as a discrete GPU but it can address quadruple the RAM of the biggest consumer dGPU. It'll be good for inference if the software stack works.

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

Is the audience truly gamers? Presumed this was just poor journalism from ars

arp242 2y ago
It's billed as "Massive gaming capability, heavy-duty AI compute, and standard PC parts, all in 4.5L." on the Framework website. And then further below it has "All the power to play all the games." And it has a dedicated "Gaming" tab with benchmarks and stuff. So I'd say yes.
currymj 2y ago
their marketing photos include 1) a game controller next to the PC, 2) a bottle of Bawls soda next to the PC, so I think so.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

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 to escalate to all-new levels of eye-wateringly expensive stupidity which makes me not want to buy any discrete GPU until Nvidia and AMD bring their prices back down to earth and that whole mess with the new Nvidia power connector is properly resolved, and that’s to say nothing about the unstoppable creep of GPU size, heat, and power consumption. If I could sell my full size gaming tower and replace it with an effortlessly inaudible yet reasonably powerful air cooled SFF box, I might just do it. In all truth I could probably get by fine with this first gen Framework desktop, but it would make more sense to wait for a second or third gen where the APU's graphical power comes into the range of upper-tier RTX 3000 cards so I don’t need to use framegen as a crutch for decent framerates.

Agingcoder 2y ago
I agree with the point about noise. I’ve been looking for a powerful, compact and silent gaming pc for a while ( with silent then compact being more important than powerful ). I don’t need a laptop - a Mac mini-like or slightly bigger box is good enough . When I look around, gaming pcs are mostly about big and visible, sometimes reasonably silent, almost never compact, inconspicuous and silent. To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet. Since I have so far failed in my quest, I now use GeForce Now from my Mac mini which is a good approximation of what I want.
- skyyler 2y ago
  >To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet. Because the market you describe has very heavy expectations, and very exacting taste. (And critically, the capability of building one themselves.)
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    > (And critically, the capability of building one themselves.) Kind of but not really. Any SFF build that’s anywhere close to similar in size and capabilities to the Framework is probably going to be making considerably more noise, even with an AIO liquid cooler.
lelandbatey 2y ago
Just a note that the GPU in this, while quite good, is still basically a midrange laptop GPU. It seems to be a tad bit better than an RTX 2060 but worse than any Nvidia card sold at a higher tier than that. You're right that's probably fine for most folks though. For folks building a gaming PC though, a RTX 4060 will probably be pretty great.
seanalltogether 2y ago
This is exactly where I'm at now. I honestly don't care about PC upgradability anymore. I buy a new cpu, motherboard, memory and gpu all at once, and I'd be more then happy to just buy it all as one integrated unit. And fan noise is also a BIG deal for me. 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.

sliken 2y ago

Small, quiet, and more energy efficient is a good start. I also saw that while it competed well with a 4070 at average frame rates, that the 1% lows were twice as fast. The speculation I saw was that the 12GB vram limit was causing issues on the Nvidia side. Having twice the bandwidth, dynamically allocated VRAM, and very decent cores seems like a solid workhouse that it's more about better worst case performance (when you are heavily cache missing or running out of vram). Sure some will buy a top of the line CPU from Intel or AMD, buy a larger case, and buy a RTX 5080 or 5090, for the 98% of the rest this strix halo will be plenty and will use less power, create less noise, and generate less heat.