framework-youtube.md

Ever since they launched their first laptop back in 2021, and a short man on the internet gave them some money to help make it happen. Framework has been making waves in the industry, and it's not really a surprise. They're laptops that are intended to be repairable and serviceable and upgradeable, which isn't a new idea, but it's something that nobody had really done successfully yet. And to their credit, Framework has been pretty successful at it so far. Which begs the question why this right here, what I have in my box here today, the Framework desktop, their first foray into the fixed computer, the computer on your desk, the computer next to your monitor, has been so controversial. I swear this has got to be the most controversial computer of the year. Now, sticking with Framework's DNA, you can purchase this system as a barebones. So, no SSDs, but in our case, I speced it out with two of these 4 TBTE WD SN850X drives. Uh, these are Gen 4 SSDs. I love these. I have them in my main system. Highly recommend. We've got a whackload of IO modules because just like their laptops, the Framework Desktop also has customizable IO with these little modules. But, let's get the computer out, shall we? Naturally, as you can tell, there's going to be some assembly required. Not as much as I thought maybe, but it is worth noting that you can't currently buy the Framework desktop fully assembled yet. Look at that. Oh, there's stickers in the box. Framework does a lot of stuff better than Apple. And uh this is one of them. They also include a screwdriver, which is huge. Oh, wa wa. It's two screwdrivers in one. Wow. Would you believe me if I told you there's 128 GB of RAM in here? Not only that, but 16 AMD Ryzen Zen 5 processing cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. What does that all mean? Well, this is stricks Halo, baby. And it should be fast as heck. Like hecking fast. Like faster than Arlo will jump up on the table when I have food. Watch this. I'll I'll demo. See what I mean? He's already here. All of that, including the power supply, the CPU cooler, and everything in this tiny 4.5 L chassis. Just look at it. It's so small. Now, before I jump into assembling it, let's take a look at the IO here. We've got HDMI 2.1, dual USB 4 type-C 40 GB ports. We've got a pair of Display Port 2.1 over here, 5 GB Ethernet, and then also a pair of 10 GB USB type A and of course 3.5 mil audio. Over here, we've got a C13 for the power supply down there. The top looks kind of boring. You see these little connections here first and foremost so you can remove the top panel and access things like the CPU fan headers, but also so you can use those holes to mount a handle for this thing and make it like a little portable gaming machine. Like say if you go to land parties or something, except they didn't include the handle for me. So, let's take a look at the front where you can see it looks kind of crappy, but that's because we're not done yet. The box I didn't want to open earlier contains a bunch of cute little things you can put on here. And they call them tiles along with more IO modules and the power cable. You can also option this thing with no power cable, which is one of the things that I saw some people complaining about like, uh, you're going to make me pay extra for a power cable. No, that is not how pricing works. It's a good thing. A, so we're not just shipping power cables that are going to sit in a box or a drawer because you already have a billion of them. and B, so you don't have to pay for one if you already have a billion of them. If it's not an optional thing, it's just factored into the price. It's no different. But you know what can be different? How you go about learning how to code. Fortunately for us, boot.dev, who sponsored this portion of today's video, aims to fix exactly that. They basically cracked the code on making programming fun and engaging to learn by basically turning it into a video game. I know it sounds crazy, but imagine this. You're learning how to do back-end web development by learning Python and SQL and Go. And at the same time, you're earning XP. You're leveling up. You're completing quests. Heck, you're even doing boss fights all while learning. And their courses teach you the tools of the trade while you're working through them. So, you learn also how to use Linux and Git and Docker. It's kind of crazy, but not as crazy as the fact that they give you all of the course material, the lessons, the video tutorials, the starter code on their website for free. So, you can start to learn how to make real web projects without any risk to your wallet. And if their interactive learning style works for you, like it does for me, then use code Jaku and you can get 25% off an annual plan that gives you all of those fantastic interactivity features like hands-on coding, AI assistance, progress tracking for all of their courses. So check it out at the link down below. It's seriously awesome. Now, they sell these as little packs when you buy them, or you can order them separately. And they also have the 3D file up on the internet, so you can just 3D print little guys that just clip right on here, and you don't even need to buy any of them if you don't want them. It's just like a cute little way to personalize your computer. I probably wouldn't recommend putting all solid ones like this little heart one. Um, but I guess you could. This is the best one ever made. Look at it. Touch grass. There we go. Look at that. See, he's he's vibing in the grass. Now, if you had thought about this when you were ordering, you could have picked colors that looked decent and like had enough to fill it up. Uh or you could do what I did and just asked for random colors without thinking about it at all and end up with something like this. Now, also on the front is a power button down here and then also our IO module slots. Now, longterm, I was thinking to set this thing up as a little AI box for my house, but I also need like a little ingest station for reading SD cards. So, if I just slapped a couple SD card readers in the front of this thing. Ah, boom. Now I've got a dualpurpose machine. But also, the front just magnets on. So, it was time for an ADHD side quest. Now, I recently got my hands on this maker carvver, which is a desktop CNC. So, we used it to cut out some balsa wood we had laying around. 3D printed these little adapters out of carbon fiber infused polycarbonate on my Prussa Core 1. And then we can just stick it on there. Tada. Cute, right? That only took like five hours. There's the side panel it comes with. It's black and vented naturally for the CPU fan, which we're gonna install here. Blah blah blah. Kind of like something like that. Or you can get a translucent one like this, which is obviously the answer. That is way way sicker being able to see them computer guts. What is this? You see that tube right there? That's for the power supply. It must intake air from one side and then like pee it out the front here. That's kind of cute, actually. These are great SSDs. Super fast. Pretty much as fast as Gen 4 SSDs get. You know what? We put that Linux penguin on the front there. I have never daily driven Linux as my like desktop computer operating system. Not once. Even though I use it every day on servers and stuff. Maybe that would be a fun video. Get subscribed so you don't miss if I happen to do that. Now, it's a 400 watt Flex ATX 80 plus gold power supply. And right above it, you can see in there a PCIe Gen 4x4 PCIe connector. So, in theory, you might be able to plug a graphics card into this thing, but I don't know why you would want to do that. It is a closedback PCIe slot for some reason. So, putting a bigger card in there just like won't work. But, I mean, I guess you could try to make it work. Also, we've got that PCIe slot, which is great, except it doesn't go to anything there. It's blocked off. What the heck? I don't know why you wouldn't have just made this thing like six millimeters taller or whatever it needed to be to be able to fit uh you know even a half height PCIe slot there. That seems like a kind of a strange decision. I'm I'm not going to lie. Now, also on the back is an AMD Wi-Fi 7 chip, which is great to see. It uses an internal antenna, but all of those pieces should be pieces you can get presumably. Looking at the front here, could mount an 80 mil fan for extra cooling if you wanted. It doesn't come with that, though. And there's even a CMOS reset button right there, too. Let's get the CPU fan installed because I want to play with this thing. Now, I'm going to be honest. I didn't think my first PC build on my own channel was going to be this easy. It's just like putting a couple little things in there. Huh. Wow. Look at that. All right. Computer build complete. Now, because this system comes potentially barebones, one of the other things you kind of need to figure out for yourself is an operating system. When you're specking your framework desktop out, you do have the option to go with Windows 11 Home or Pro. That's a download they send you. Or you can just opt to have no operating system. Say if you already have a Windows license, you're going to find your own. Or maybe you're going to try Linux. I've got mine running Windows 11 Pro 24H2. And once you do have Windows installed, you also need to go on the Framework website and download the driver bundle. That includes drivers for everything from the chipset to the graphics card to the Wi-Fi and the Ethernet. You're going to want to use that. I also went ahead and downloaded the latest graphics drivers from AMD's website and updated those. However, it's worth noting that's not necessarily the most recommended way to go. You should stick with Frameworks driver if you want the most reliable compatible setup. Since it's not technically like a desktop CPU and chipset, it's more of a laptop one. There can be some weird compatibility issues and stuff depending on the board design and whatnot. And after you've done all that, you still got to go into settings, hit system, then power, then change the power mode from balanced to best performance. Because if you stay in that balance profile, you're going to have the same situation as most of the people that reviewed this thing and have your system be stuck at around 100 watts. When in actuality, it can boost up to 160 watts for a short period of time, then 140 for an extended period of time, a few minutes or so, and then it should level off around 120 watts. So, you're actually giving up a fair bit of performance if you don't make this change. It's an insanely easy step for somebody to miss and end up being like, "Yo, why is my computer not going as fast as I thought it would?" That's just crazy. Now, I did want to quickly mention that the Framework Desktop does come in a couple other SKs. You can get one with the Max 385 that's only 1,100 base price. There's also a 64 gig variant of this one with the 16 core max plus 395 that starts at 1,600 USD. This one starts at 2 grand. If you factor in the almost $700 of storage, at least at frameworks prices, a Windows license, the knock to a CPU cooler and a power cable, you're at almost $3,000 for this thing. So, that's uh that's some money. I mean, you could definitely get SSDs for much cheaper than Framework sells them for, and that's why they give you that option. So, let's see how fast it goes. I want to start with Passark's performance test. This is one of my favorite benchmarks to run on pretty much any system because it gives you a really good baseline of how all the different aspects of the system perform. And they also have a massive database of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of other entries that you can compare your system to. A to see if it's performing as you expect, and B to see how it compares to other parts. Yo, look at that. 61,000 points. Let's check out the Passmark page for a 9950X, which has the same 16 cores, albeit with a lot more power budget. Yeah, 61,300 versus 66,000 average. That's pretty freaking close. It's not quite the same, but at heart, it's a mobile SOC like you would see in a laptop, right? That's an impressive amount of performance, especially seeing it unccorked with a big full-size desktop cooler like this. As for the GPU, almost 23,000 points in the 3D test and 1,200 in the 2D test. If we take those numbers and then go to Passmark's GPU leaderboard, we can see that puts us in the realm of like a 5060Ti 4060Ti kind of card. I mean, they're basically the same thing or like a seven00 XT. And I'm not talking about the laptop variants. That's the desktop variant. That's a that's a lot of compute power in this little package. Holy crap. I'm in Arc Raiders game that just came out. This is an extraction shooter. Not a category I'm super familiar with, but at 1440p in the medium preset with no resolution scaling and the most basic anti-aliasing settings, I'm getting anywhere from 100 to 120 FPS depending on where I am. And that is way more than playable. 100 FPS, that's high refresh rate, baby. Oh no, they're looting my corpse. No, stop it. It's not too loud either. measuring from pretty normal kind of seated distance with the system next to you. We're looking around 40 to 42dB in a game. That's actually perfectly respectable. It's not the quietest computer I've ever used, mind you. We are in the performance mode, but it's also not the loudest either. And then in Overwatch 2, we're in the range of 150 to 180 FPS in the practice range at 1440p, but the ultra preset this time, which is fantastic performance. That's way more than I could even want out of something like this. And then in Counter-Strike 2 on the low preset with just the most basic anti-aliasing turned on, we're talking 300 FPS almost average and 1% lows around 130 FPS. So whether it's esports stuff you're playing or really high-end demanding games, you're not going to have any problem with this computer. But that's not really what it's meant for. You should order the version that has just 64 gigs of RAM if all you're intending to do is game. But if you're doing anything like video editing or what this thing is really meant for LLMs, large language models, that's where that 128 gigs of RAM becomes really important. Even though it's soldered, which is what everyone has been losing their mind over on this computer, guys, we get it. Framework's whole thing has been repairability, but if you want this chip, you cannot have it in any other way than soldered memory. AMD simply does not allow it. They wouldn't sell it to Framework to try to use with socketed memory. It probably wouldn't even work. Sure, Framework could have been like, "Yo, dog, let's use a different CPU, but if they wanted the level of performance that you get with Stricks Halo, which we've seen is really freaking good. You have to have soldered memory. It's really fast. The latency is almost nothing. And technically, if you really wanted to, you could desolder a memory chip and replace it. You You could end rant. Stop complaining about the soldered memory. Just don't buy it if you're not comfortable with that." and framework. Maybe make something with a different CPU that has socketed memory in the future. That would also be really cool. They could make a different board that you can slap right in there. Huh. Yeah. Now that we've gone into the BIOS and changed our GPU to have 96 GB of dedicated memory, I've hopped into Cache OS, which is like an optimized version of Arch. It's got a bunch of packages built with optimizations for Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips, which actually can make a pretty big performance difference. Now, we're going to be using LM Studio, which is a great app for tinkering with LLMs. and specifically in the Vulcan mode. Apparently, the best performance on Linux for AI stuff is actually using AMD's Rockm library. It's not great in Windows. Vulcan is definitely the preference there. However, it doesn't really have proper support for Stricks Halo yet. We're going to stick to Vulcan for now. Let's load up the OpenAI 120 billion parameter model. And you'll notice over on the side there, I've got Btop open. It only says we've got like 32 GB of RAM. That's because the other 96 are stuck with our GPU. Write me a 250word story about framework computer building a repable printer. That's right. Narov, get wrecked. And this is a reasoning model. I mean, the reasoning effort was set to low, so it didn't reason for long. All it thought was it needs 250 words exactly. But look at that. 50 tokens a second nearly. That's crazy. Now, for some perspective, let's run the exact same Quen 3 VL 8 billion parameter model in a 4bit quant that I used in the MacBook M5 video and see how fast that goes. Yeah, 40 tokens a second. The M5 MacBook Pro was giving me around 25 26 tokens a second. So, this is quite a bit faster. Now, for even more perspective, the M4 Max that I have in my personal MacBook Pro can run this model at like 70 tokens a second. So, you can see how having more memory bandwidth makes a huge difference. Let's try an even more crazier model, one that only barely fits in here. This on its own is a 70 gabte model, which is pretty hefty. It's got 70 billion parameters. It's known to be quite good. And there we go. It's not going super fast to be clear, but it is working. Oh. Oh, there is a VRAM indicator. Look, I didn't even notice that before. Right there. 71 GB of VRAM used. Wow. It doesn't run great, but it does run. And that's the cool thing. Overall then, the Framework Desktop is a seriously competent machine. It can game really well. It can do AI really well. It can do even productivity stuff pretty well, too. It's kind of hard to identify flaws with this. I do wish, just like everybody else, that it had socketed memory, but that just isn't possible with this chip. So, it's not going to happen. And that's not Framework's fault. They ended up with a super compact machine that, considering how small of a company they are, is genuinely pretty impressive. And who knows what's to come. Maybe AMD will come out with a new version that uses CAM memory modules, has swappable memory, and then they'll just release a new board that you can pop into your existing framework desktop. It exists in a class pretty much of its own, and I uh can't wait to play with it some more. So, thanks for watching. Hit the subscribe button down below if you're not subscribed yet. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the framework desktop. And of course, thanks to our sponsor, boot.dev. They can help you learn how to do cool code stuff with your framework desktop, too. Bye. Also, subscribe to my Patreon, jack.com/patreon. Thank you. Bye. Carlo. Hi, buddy. Hello. Who's a good boy?