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Framework Desktop (2025) Review: Powerful, but perhaps not for everyone

Framework's first desktop is muscular and powerful at the expense of modularity and repairability.

It’s an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) — AMD’s term for a chip combining a CPU, GPU and NPU in a single package, much like Apple Silicon — with plenty of hyped-up claims about its performance. He described it as “silent while sitting on your desktop under normal loads, and even under gaming, it’s impressively quiet.” If you’re familiar with Framework’s track record and products so far, that quote will have instantly provoked scoffing. The 120mm fan barely got noisy at all, and I can only recall it becoming noticeable when running heavier AI models in LM Studio and when I started exporting the video file.

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