Framework has branched out. The company made some of the most interesting laptops we’ve seen, but it has now also announced the release of a desktop computer. We had our doubts about how upgradeable this computer might actually be, but an early teardown suggests there’s more than what Framework let us on initially.

iFixit got its hands on an early pre-production Framework Desktop, ahead of the computer’s expected release later this year. The company’s laptop product was all about upgradeability and modularity, and as we expected, the new desktop computer tries not to skimp on that either. The teardown suggests you might still be well served with this computer for the foreseeable future, even after the hardware eventually becomes obsolete.

The Good Stuff

For starters, the Framework Desktop sticks mostly to industry standards and doesn’t do any proprietary stuff. We already had confirmation of all this in the computer’s official spec sheet, but it’s still good to see someone pop it open so we can take a peek at how easy, or hard, the path forward for upgradeability over the next few years might be. Spoiler alert: it’s really promising.

The Framework Desktop’s case is built from the ground up with upgradeability in mind. The case itself can be opened up with just thumbscrews and magnets, and if you need to take it apart completely, it also has regular flat head screws that you can unscrew with any screwdriver in your home. It also comes with a Noctua fan for cooling, but you can swap it out with any 120mm fan. The heatsink itself, while pre-installed, seems to also have a roughly standard mount that’s also screwed in and easily removable.

We raised some concerns in our article yesterday about the power supply and Expansion Card system potentially getting in the way of future repairs, but that’s also pretty open as well. The power supply is just your standard 400W Flex ATX power supply—these power supplies are considerably smaller in size and are frequently used in small-form-factor (SFF) PC builds, and it’s not that hard to swap it out with other power supplies with higher power capabilities.

There are some out there capable of 600W or even 800W. The expansion bays, on the other hand, seem to just use regular 20-pin Key-A USB Type E front panel headers, and the bays should work with other motherboards as well. And the motherboard is just a Mini-ITX size and it can be fully swapped out for an aftermarket one—you can even buy it separately if you want to pop it into a custom case.

When we asked Framework whether this was an option, the company didn’t really give us a definitive answer, so it’s good to see that it’s indeed possible.

The Bad Stuff

Not everything is perfect, though. As we pointed out yesterday, the Ryzen AI Max processor is soldered—this is to be expected since it’s a laptop processor that can’t be socketed. Another bad part is that the RAM is also soldered, although according to Framework, the company had no choice if it was going to use AMD’s Strix Halo CPUs:

So we did actually ask AMD about this the first time they told us about Strix Halo. It was literally our first question: ‘How do we get modular memory? We are Framework after all.’ And they didn’t say no actually, they did assign one of their technical architects to really really go deep on this—they ran simulations, they ran studies, and they just determined it’s not possible with Strix Halo to do LPCAMM. The signal integrity doesn’t work out because of how that memory’s fanning out over the 256-bit bus.

It’s good to see that you can actually swap out the motherboard and perform as many upgrades as your heart desires. But the remaining concern is one that’s actually related to the case rather than the whole computer, and might impact those looking to significantly upgrade their computers down the road—there is no space for a GPU or, really, any PCIe expansion cards. The case has no PCI Express slots, and even if it had them, there’s almost no space inside to fit one.

If you want to add extra graphics muscle to this computer, you can work around this by getting a motherboard that supports Thunderbolt or USB 4 and getting an external GPU enclosure. But there is sadly no way to pop one inside.

As a reminder, this computer will ship later this year, and pre-orders are now open with a refundable $100 deposit to reserve yours.

Source: iFixit, Framework