Framework, the American company known for its line of user-serviceable laptops, has announced a few days ago the upcoming availability of a new desktop, in a very small format. We covered it in a longer article, too. It should hit the market in Q3 2025.

It will be powered by a AMD Ryzen™ AI Max 385 (or 390) and feature from 32 to 128GB of soldered RAM. It will also possess a NPU to accelerate (smaller) AI models, and in terms of gaming capabilities, it will be powerful enough to make demanding games run at 1080p high settings at around 60FPS most of the game, according go their (promotional) benchmarks. Since the high-end version will feature 128GB of RAM, this makes this Framework Desktop also a good candidate to run AI workloads with fairly large models. It won’t replace a discrete GPU, but it may be one of the cheapest options out there to run such models (like 70b models for example).

In this context, we were interested to know if our audience was interested in such a machine after the reveal. Here’s the results below.

Overall, it’s a positive reception, with more than a third of respondents actually interested in this machine, and another 28% who want to see some more results before having a clear opinion (which is reasonable, I hope that Framework will share more details ahead of the actual launch).

The more interesting bit for me, was to see how much interest there was in the gaming usage versus the AI usage. I did not know what to expect. To be totally transparent, I am currently heavily involved in AI models and I have a biased view that many people are just like me, and my first reaction when I heard about the Framework Desktop was “this may be a great machine to run AI models!”.

Turns out that in our audience, the larger interest is gaming, 2.5 times more than AI usage. I believe this may be representative of a somewhat larger public, which is why Framework decided to position it as a gaming machine first and foremost during their event. AI usage it not completely ridiculous either in the survey answers. There is not an obvious overlap between gamers and AI practitioners (they just both like GPUs for different reasons) and it was a smart move for Framework to mention both, to expand their marketability.

We will certainly cover the Framework Desktop again in the near future, so stay tuned.

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