I cancelled my Framework Desktop order and ordered a HP Z2 Mini G1a instead, the goal being to replace my Mac Studio as I've had it with Apple's arrogance and lousy software quality. The HP is much smaller, has ECC RAM and 10G Ethernet. Significantly more expensive, however.
Apple have certainly taken a couple steps back re: overall reliability, but if you think that the grass is greener on the other side…pray tell how that goes
Plus, you can now deploy [MLX projects on CUDA](https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/pull/1983)
Even if the grass is the same on the other side a 50% discount for the same performance doesn’t seem too bad.
Was scoffing at HP, but then you got my attention with ECC RAM. Looks nice as well.
Keep scoffing, it's not real end to end ECC, just "link" ecc, which is just part of the chip -> CPU pipeline.
So it's not full ECC like servers have with dimms with a multiple of 9 chips with ECC protecting everything from the dimms to the CPU.
Keep in mind the ram is inside the strix halo package, not something HP has control over.
You're right, I had asked my HP specialist to confirm that it was ECC, and he had said yes, but when I prompted him again on the distinction between link ECC (protects data in motion) vs true on-die ECC (protects data at rest in RAM, much more important), he admitted it was the former and canceled my order.
I now ordered a Beelink GTR9 Pro, which unlike the Framework has dual 10G Ethernet, not the weird 5G flavor. We'll see how that goes.
Ah, interesting. Did you get a ship date? I do like the idea of dual 10G. It would be nice to see a review on how well the GTR9's cooling works and how quiet it is under full load.
> Keep in mind the ram is inside the strix halo package, not something HP has control over.
It's not in the package, it's on the motherboard spread around the SoC package: https://www.hp.com/content/dam/sites/worldwide/personal-comp...
The 8 DRAM packages pretty clearly indicate you're not getting the extra capacity for end-to-end ECC as you would on a typical workstation or server memory module.
Wait is there any actual difference in the RAM between the HP and the Framework Desktop?
No I dont think so, all ddr5 has some "ECC" but not full ECC, ie you cant see corrections. And all the AI maxes have the same LPDDR5
Many mobile devices have on-chip ECC because they have to for signal integrity reasons... technically the Raspberry Pi 5 has ECC too, by that definition!
Lack of ECC is what prevents the Framework Desktop from being anything else than an expensive toy.
Apple isn't using ECC either. If your only aim is to run LLMs how much do you actually care about ECC?
>Apple isn't using ECC either.
And thus their machines are expensive toys as well.
(I type this on a system I built, a 9800x3d with 96GB (2x 48GB) ECC RAM.)
>If your only aim is to run LLMs how much do you actually care about ECC?
That is not me, nor do I know anyone who exclusively uses computers to run LLMs.
Do you linux on this ? if so.. does everything work ?
Haven't received it yet, but of course I will install Linux on it.
Please respond to this with a link to your quick synopsis.
It is also, unfortunately, insanely loud.