192gb memory: $127 million dollars.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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Sooo, hyperbole aside, I did a quick search on the site of the retailer I last obtained parts through, right before the prices exploded, and their cheapest 1x64GB RAM DDR5 stick is about £2320.
(Big assumption here that the motherboard only has four RAM slots. If you're going to cram 192GB onto it, you're going to need at least a couple of those, and preferably three, not 2x64+2x32, hence not looking at smaller capacity sticks.)
As I write, eBay has one seller with a single 1x64GB DDR5 at a quarter of that, which makes me think they must be going by pre-explosion pricing, but it also has something at well over £10k, four times the other way (and more), so at least logarithmically, the stand-alone retailer is right in the middle.
That means that this server is probably going to be well in excess of £10k when they finally ship it with full spec. If they're offering a warranty or support contract, probably around £20k. (Or £30k if they do the trick of simply changing the currency sign on a US dollar amount).
Not that it matters much since I think your math here checks out - but the framework desktop is all soldered memory, so no slots for memory needed. Likely some higher density chips used here than a 64GB DIMM stick. Point being, your estimate may still be optimistic!
Still don't know why the company who prides itself on reparability and upgradibility even released a unit with unrepairable components, even given their latency justification.
The soldering decisions are confounding because of their mission.
It was a tradeoff between replaceable RAM or high throughput. For this device they felt the performance was more important than the ability to replace / upgrade RAM.
It was more AMD than Framework AFAIK. Soldered memory is basically a requirement to run the strix halo platform.
They've used LPCAMM on the Framework 13 Pro. I did wonder if they were going to update the Desktop to do the same.
It's not RAM slots, it's unified memory, built into the CPU/chip. ALso means you can't expand it later.
127 million double dollars? Oh my…
The naming conventions nowadays for tech is just the stupidest sounding bullshit. Get the all new AMD AI Mega MAX+ AI Pro Ultra AI Quantum Pro Max.
For real, tho
Max is supposed to be, well, maximum
Which is not only not the case since they had to put a "+" on top of it, but it is also, apparently, wasn't good enough, so they slapped "Pro" to boot.
Even without the "AI" crap the name is ridiculous.
Why couldn't it have been Ryzen 495? Sure, make it Ryzen AI 495 even, whatever. But Max+ Pro? Seriously, AMD? Did they let a 12 year old chuunibyo name their products? What in the f happened here?
Asked their LLM to 'make it more Appley' and it barfed up this.
I don't get it - what's the market for an overpriced ( even by today's standards ) non-upgradeable but "build it yourself" desktop pc? Is it because its a prebuilt server? Or just the fancy case?
LLM inference, most likely
I don't see a price there, so I'm not sure how "overpriced" it is. But it's a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.
The use cases are mostly local AI. That's very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can't get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.
Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.
Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).
This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.
The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain't cheap, and I don't think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.
They don't even have the 128GB or 192GB options available when you click "Customize Now" the base 32GB option starts at $1,269 USD with no storage. So yeah, just a bit over priced.
Even the 128GB version starts at $3,500 despite being out of stock. Yeah... overpriced.
That makes it one of the cheaper options in this category.
The GMKtec EVO-X2 is $3500, so a bit cheaper when you factor in storage. I don't think you can find any 128GB Ryzen 395 systems for cheaper than that. HP's costs $4700. Beelink's is $4400.
And then there are similar non-Ryzen systems, like the Nvidia Spark at $4600 or the MacBook Pro is $7k.
Just because they're ALL overpriced doesn't mean this one isn't, too
Well, MacBook Pro or also Mac Studio. Pre shortage, you could spec out the Mac Studio with 512 GB of RAM, if you had stupidly deep pockets.
You also have the benefit that, since it's a single memory pool, it can be used for other things, and allocated dynamically.
Where in a conventional machine, VRAM is exclusively for the GPU to use, and RAM is generally for the system. The capacities are usually fixed (I think it's possible to offload GPU memory into system memory for some uses, but that's about it, and your performance usually falls off).
Downside is that because it's a shared memory pool, everything uses it, so you lose some of the actual capacity for things like your OS.
The reason (besides ram apocalypse) for the price and non upgradability is the ram is very fast low latency unified memory. It's close to using VRAM for the CPU and gpu.
There's a standard for upgradable lpcamm2 but Framework didn't use it probably because it's even more impossible to source with the RAM shortage.
Framework said that even LPCAMM2 cannot support the desired ram speed of strix halo.
It's a small box that supposedly does some specific workloads well. It's a weird product for framework though.
this is my thought. seems contrary to their whole schtick.
It is targeting the local AI inference market. This is a good choice for a developer who wants one x86 machine to run models that cross the threshold that fits comfortably into 128GB of unified RAM, which is quite a few.
I was trying to work out the same thing. The whole idea of Framework is a repairable and modular product in a market where most products are entirely the opposite.
Doubles up as soundproofing
Cause you can't hear anything else?
So is this unified memory like the Macs?
Yeah, same as the old one
...and DGX Spark.
Cool that they themed it to a Borg ship.