I've been looking for a new mini PC for the Whale Land that's coming up because
I don't want to lug my server rack there. And this little guy by Framework,
the Framework Desktop, might just be what I want. But unfortunately, I think
they've made some decisions that also scares me about the direction of
framework. We'll get into that a bit later. Let's open up the box, see what
comes with it. We got our left panel, translucent, and there it is. That is
the entire computer. It is incredibly
small and incredibly portable, which again is why I was so interested in this
little device. We've got stickers. I'll put those on later. Quick start manual,
the one screwdriver, which is all you should need. An SSD or you can BYO
framework desktop tiles. Okay, these are
tiny little plastic things that can go on the front of your computer,
giving it a little bit of personality. As excited as I am by how cute they
look, this is actually one of the things I'm going to be complaining about later.
Accessory box, which includes, oh my gosh, even more of these tile packs that
we can throw on the front. I believe it holds up to 21 different tiles, and you
can configure them in any sort of order. And I believe you can also 3D print
them. We actually did a main video on LT when these first were announced, and we
had some kind of cool designs. C13 power cable, which is not actually normally
included. Excuse me. This cable costs $4 on Amazon
if I want to buy one or $5 from your site and you have the audacity to charge
me for one. The computer doesn't work without it. I'm a little frustrated. I
just think it's kind of ridiculous that something that is missionritical for the
device to work doesn't come with it by default. Take a deep breath. It's fine.
We can move on. Wow, we got a whole whack ton here. Whole bunch of different
slants. We got ones that are sideways. We got some that are vertical. They're
actually vented as well, so that way you can have a front intake. You should
still put a fan on this CPU, which again, you can buy from their website,
or you can just get the fan kit, which is free, and then bring your own fan.
So, they give you the fan kit for free, but not the power cord.
In classic framework fashion, you can also get the expansion cards because
this device right at the bottom you can add up to two. So you could do USBC,
USBA, the Ethernet has just enough clearance that you could put that. You
don't need the Ethernet though on this because this nick in the back is 5 GB.
I'm excited. Okay, because that's actually pretty cool. Most desktops
would be like 1 or 2.5. Having five is
incredible. And lastly, the handle, which I've been told they actually
didn't send to us, but it is an option. I believe each one of these little tiles
that you can buy that are like branded or loled with Linux or something are $5
each. And then a pack of these, which
comes with seven, was $10. That's one of the things that I alluded to in the
intro that I was a little frustrated about. You get zero by default. So, if
you want to customize the kit fully, you pay an extra $30. The reason this
computer is so exciting to people like me who want a portable gaming station is
because this is using the new Ryzen AI Max Plus 395. It's kind of a mouthful.
You don't have to get the maxed out one. You can get the 385 chip which only
comes with 32 GB of RAM. And I think that's probably going to be good for a
lot of people. Obviously, I wanted the maxed out one. I want to take this thing
as apart as I can though because it is so tiny. How do they fit everything in
there? They told me if I wanted to take the hoodie off cuz I'm getting too warm. I have to plug ltstore.com. So, go buy
it so I can be free from this. We'll see how apart I can get this thing. Before
we boot it up, we are going to need to install the fan kit, but I want to tear
it all down and see. Oh, yeah. There is even it's a PCIe Gen 4x4 slot right at
the bottom. So, you could probably add another MVME SSD on it. Or maybe there
will be a way to get a riser and an expansion bay for some sort of graphics
card or GPU or something. It does already come with two MVME slots. One on
the front here, which is Oh, actually right there on the side. And then one on
the back of the board. Do I twist these?
Ow. There we go. Use my little wind pans
there. There was an arrow. I could have paid attention to the arrow. Okay. Now,
now the back. I see. Now it slides up
and away. And there's the second SSD spot. There's also our Wi-Fi card back
here which does Wi-Fi 7 which is a nice addition. I wouldn't use it. You have 5
Gbit like I said earlier, so but it's a nice addition. They didn't cut any cost
there. I realize I said what the chip was, but I didn't talk about why this
would make a good gaming PC and it's actually the Radeon 8060S GPU that's
included. And because the memory is soldered directly onto the board, you
can do similar to what Apple has had for a number of years, which is the unified memory in the BIOS. You can configure
the amount of RAM you want to go to your GPU versus your CPU. It doesn't quite
work like Apple's and it's not dynamic depending on the workflow. You have to
set it, you know, when you boot the PC up. And this is where it gets a little
weird for me. Framework did a whole write up about why they needed to solder
the RAM. It's because they want to get the most performance out of the LP DDR5X
memory that is on here. It's just for Framework, which started out as a
repairability first company. You can swap all the parts out, buy the parts on
their website. It feels backwards and
weird that they've soldered the memory on. If you want to upgrade this down the
line, you can't. You have to buy a whole new computer or a whole new board. You
are getting great performance. So, that's again where I get conflicted on
this. I want to get to those performance numbers though and actually see if maybe it's worth it. Maybe I can overlook it.
We need to install our fan first. Is this the fan? This is the fan kit. looks
3D printed, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It means you could probably
make your own, but everything's all in
paper. I do like the packaging material. The only bit of like hard plastic that
I've seen so far was what was installed on the computer to help protect it. It's
a good that that is great. At least they're not killing more sea turtles.
Okay. Did it come with instructions? Oh, the QR code. Let's see if they fixed
it. Does it take me? Yeah, it takes me directly to the CPU fan. That was an
issue in an LTT where I scanned a QR code and it didn't take me to the
correct product. Thank you, framework. Orient the fan so the label is facing
downward and the cable is pointed towards the top of the computer. There
you go. Tells you which direction. Top of the computer. All right. Holy cow.
That is going to be a very snug fit once we get that side panel on. I need to
plug it in first though. Oh, that's cool. They have a little
cutout so you can actually if I can feed the cable through there.
There we go. Hey, there you go. That is actually kind of nice. So, you're not
trying to jam your fingers down there. Insert fan duct, which is this thing.
Gives it a nice snug little fit. And then install the fan screws. Pretty
easy.
And then all we need to do is put our side panel on. We've got the clear one
here, but there is a solid one available. Or apparently you can 3D
print one that can make your Noctua fan quite a lot quieter. Apparently the
website says what, 5 to 7 dB. That is a significant amount for a 3D printed mod.
But hey, if it works, it works.
Oh, look at how cute this thing is. Ah, lots of ventilation. That's awesome.
Little magnetic front panel. We should decorate the front panel, right, Bjorn?
Yeah. All right, let's decorate it.
There's an LT one. Oh, that's cute. There's a blank one. I mean, you
probably don't want to do the solid panels because again, you can fit an 80 millimeter fan in the front here if you
wanted more air intake. You probably would want to do like the slotted ones.
Oh, there's another Linus one. It's Tux.
It's Tux. They put a little Linux QR code. Where does this take us? No. No.
Oh my god. I've been hacked.
You can tell their framework CEO is a boomer. Still uses that meme. Boomer.
Narov. I'm sorry. Oh, we got a little ShortCircuit one.
There you go. >> Finally. >> Some recognition around here. Smiley
face. Little pride heart. Hell yeah. Oh no. I got one here.
Oh, that's the other half of wide Linus.
just because it'll bother people. Beautiful, >> isn't it? Great. So, it turns out the
designed ones you I don't think you can get these exact ones. Those ones are
>> I have a slight correction. The orange ones are $15 for a pack of seven. The
black ones are $10 for a pack of seven. How much does this cost? Uh, editor, add
it all up. But yes, we made our computer look like this for that much money. Oh
god. I know I already mentioned the 5 GB port
on the back. The rest of the IO is enough. HDMI, two DisplayPort, two
USBA, two USBC, and an audio port. And
then on the front is where you get some choice. In our case, all I had on hand
was one USBC and one USBA. So that's why I chose those ones.
All right, let's plug it in and get gaming on it. Oh, thankfully our $5
power cable long enough for us to use at the desk there. If you can't tell, I'm a
little salty. We had to pay for one. What I'm not salty about, though, is
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or by scanning the QR code on the screen now. God, I hope they put one there. How
embarrassing. Cables are already pre-run. I didn't even get to use mine.
Look how tiny this thing is on the desk compared to my headphones. I actually
was just going to go turn it on cuz But where's the power button? Is that it?
Yes, that is it. That does not look like a power button, but hey, is it booting?
Oh, it's got post lights. Oh, there it is. Hey, we couldn't detect an operating
system. Oh, wait. Did I actually put the SSD in? I assumed it was in.
>> Elijah. >> Elijah. >> No. Stop.
I just got so excited to boot it up, I forgot to put the SSD in. This will be
super quick. We'll do the back one. Going from the
back. Oh yeah. Look at it right there.
Oh, it's on little hinge. Okay, that's kind of nice. Dude, speedun.
Yippee. Very excited to see this.
>> What's a QR code on left of the framework logo on the phone?
>> There's no way this works.
I will copyright this whole video framework and blame it on you. Okay, I
want to game on this thing. Here we go. We're in Cyberpunk driving around. I've
set it to 1080p, but everything is cranked except for rate tracing. No rate
tracing on. And right now our 1% lows
appear to be about 60fps. Dude, this is
awesome. This is a totally playable experience. Obviously, higher FPS the
better. I get it, right? Look at the size of this thing. And I'm getting
better than the PS4 was at launch. Probably better than the PS5 was at
launch. Holy cow. Okay, it's dipping a little bit. We're down to 50 FPS in the
1% lows. And the fan is definitely ramping up. I can start to hear it a
little bit more now that we died. Let's turn on rate tracing. Let's, you know,
let's try to this machine. We'll do ray trace lighting medium and then
I'll turn off reflections. See if we get a playful experience. Oh, cinematic 24
FPS. Dude, no, this is not a playable experience. I would not be happy with
this. Can we tweak the settings a little bit more? 50 FPS in the 1% lows. This is
about what we had before. Yeah, I turned off most of the ray tracing though, so
you know. Yeah, not a great experience with ray tracing. Let's try like an
esport title. I'm going to I want to take this thing to a land party and
that's what I would be playing mainly. I would not playing Cyberpunk at a land.
>> Do you play any uh competitive games? >> PUBG would be the only one.
>> No, but do you play like real like video games people take seriously or
>> PUBG just cut for a second. Yeah, he's going crazy. Yeah.
>> Loading up in a bot match of CS2. Our 1%
lows. Oh, got up to 100. Oh, 90 there. Okay, so it seems around 90 is where it
drops the lowest. And our average right now Oh, that's my teammate. Our average
right now is about 150. I don't know if
I expected anything higher. We're on 1440p with everything maxed out. It's
hard to be upset at this performance when you look over and see the size of
the computer. Doesn't feel warm. So, that fan is definitely doing its work.
Man, it is quiet though. It's much quieter than Cyberpunk. So, we might not
even be pushing our CPU that much on this performance. Let's talk about some
lab performance at 1080p on our list of games here. Alan Wakeake, Cyberpunk,
Dota 2, F1, and Red Dead 2, it never dropped below 60 FPS in the 1% lows. And
in some of the averages in Dota 2, it got up to 144. That is pretty impressive
for this little machine. And in two games, Cyberpunk and F1, it actually
outperformed a 4060 desktop GPU. It's
more expensive than a 4060 desktop GPU, but again, it it's very competent for
gaming. And we did try rateracing benchmarks like you saw me play. It
wasn't actually a good experience both in Cyberpunk and again the 4060 actually
outperformed when you turn ray tracing on. And then the highest benchmark we
tried was a 1440p benchmark. 60fps lows
in Red Dead which I would still consider playable. It did drop too low in my
opinion to Allen Wakeake 2. So I think 1080p is kind of the sweet spot for this
machine which isn't a bad thing. But this device might not actually be mainly
focused on gaming. It's definitely a bonus, but what you're probably
interested in or a lot of people will be interested in is the AI performance. I
know, scary buzzword, right? But you can still run many different LLMs on your
machine locally. And you could even buy a bunch of them and using that 5 GB
connection, maybe daisy chain them and make a big cluster. And the AI
performance on this thing is freaking sick. We had our Labs team test with
text generation on Llama 2 and it freaking destroyed the 4060. I again
it's a 4060 GPU. I mean maybe if you had a bunch of 5090s it would crush this
thing but this thing is as much as a
5090 on its own and the benefit of this
is you can allocate up to 96 GB of VRAM
to your GPU unlike the 5090 which is limited to 32 gigs. You can't configure
that. In some of our other tests though, on multi-core in Cinebench 2024, this
thing got on par with an i7 14700 K. And
in single core, it was basically on par again with a Ryzen 7 7800 X3D. So again,
some productive workload environments. Maybe if you just want to throw a render
on this thing after you're done editing it on a different computer, again, maybe
making a render farm out of them, connecting all of them together. It's pretty sick in terms of temperature on
this bad boy cuz you notice I did comment on the fan. It's getting a little up there if you let it run for a
bit. It didn't seem to really thermal throttle unless you really stress test
it. Cinebench 2024. It did get up to 94°
C, but on the entire run its clock
speeds were able to average 4500,
which is way higher than base. not quite as high as it can get up to, which is
5.1. But the fact that it is able to stay above its base clock for the entire
length of the run means it's never having to throttle down that severe in
the event of a temperature overload. I guess it depends though if the performance you saw today is worth the
price. This config right here is $2,300.
It does start at about $1,000 without all the little, you know, knick-knacks
in the front here. Those are all add-ons. And I think that it is worth
the price. It is a lot of money, but again, it's compromising on some things
that made framework framework. The soldered memory, the cost of these
little doodads. I know I keep hyperfixating on it, but it's it seems
ridiculous to me. Let me know what you guys think down below. Really fun to pop
out. >> Thanks so much for watching.
>> If you guys enjoyed this video, sorry. If you guys enjoyed this video and want
to see another one of my videos, go check out my first ShortCircuit, which
was called the game scent. You got to smell your games through the power of
AI, and it smelt terrible,
really bad, like ass.