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.
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.
> (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.
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.
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.
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.