The original Framework Laptop’s sales pitch was that it wanted to bring some of the modularity and repairability of the desktop PC ecosystem to a functional, thin, and light laptop. For nearly half a decade, the company has made good on that promise with multiple motherboard upgrades and other tweaks for the original 13-inch Framework Laptop; with the Framework Laptop 16 and Laptop 12, the company has tried to bring the same ethos to gaming/workstation laptops and budget PCs for students.
One of Framework’s announcements this week was for the company’s first desktop PC. Unsurprisingly dubbed the Framework Desktop, it’s aimed less at the general-purpose PC crowd and more at people who want the smallest, most powerful desktop they can build and will pay extra money to get it. Preorders for this system start now, and Framework says it should ship in Q3 of 2025.
Here was my first question: What does a company trying to build a more desktop-like laptop have to bring to the desktop ecosystem, where things are already standardized, upgradeable, and repairable?
The answer, at least for the Framework Desktop announced today: a gaming PC that takes advantage of many PC standards and offers a unique combination of small size and high performance, but which is otherwise substantially less modular and upgradeable than a mini PC you can already buy or build for yourself.
Tiny but Fast
This mini ITX board is based on existing PC standards—note the M.2 slot, the regular USB-C front headers, and the four-lane PCIe slot—but also comes with a soldered-down CPU and GPU and soldered-down, non-upgradeable RAM.Framework
The Framework Desktop is powered by an AMD Ryzen AI Max processor, a Radeon 8060S integrated GPU, and between 32 GB and 128 GB of soldered-in RAM. Over at Ars, we reviewed a more thermally constrained version of these chips in the Asus ROG Flow Z13 tablet—despite technically being an “integrated” GPU built into the same silicon as the CPU, the number of compute units (up to 40, based on AMD’s RDNA 3.5 architecture) plus the high-speed bank of soldered-in RAM gives it performance similar to a midrange dedicated laptop GPU.
In Framework’s first-party case, the PC starts at $1,099, which gets you a Ryzen AI Max 385 (that’s an 8-core CPU and 32 GPU cores) and 32 GB of RAM. A fully loaded 128 GB with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration (16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores) will run you $1,999. There’s also an in-between build with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip and 64 GB of RAM for $1,599. If you just want the mini ITX board to put in a case of your choosing, that starts at $799.
None of these are impulse buys, exactly, but they’re priced a bit better than a gaming-focused mini PC like the Asus ROG NUC, which starts at nearly $1,300 as of this writing and comes with half as much RAM. It’s also priced well compared to what you can get out of a DIY mini ITX PC based on integrated graphics—the Ryzen 7 8700G, an AM5 ITX motherboard, and 32 GB of DDR5 can all be had for around $500 collectively before you add a case, power supply, or SSD, but for considerably slower performance.
