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Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

In case it saves anyone some time (from the article): "The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395(Strix Halo) processor has been available since Spring 2025 and the Halo doesn’t offer anything new on that front."

It has the same 256 GB/s memory bandwidth limit as every board previously, not sure why this is even being released right now as if it's some new fangled thing - you can go get a Framework Desktop for roughly the same price or a GMKtec EVO-X2 for a bit cheaper.

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It's being released right now because it's massively profitable and in high demand and has actually gone up in price over the past year so obviously AMD wants to cash in on that instead of selling these units to PC manufacturers at a lower price.

I also think this is forward looking and helps reanchor expectations for RAM and memory bandwidth, which historically have been areas where companies do value engineering.

The memory shortages won't last forever; when companies start adding capacity I wouldn't be surprised to see massive sticks of RAM being sold for consumers.

Before AI I kinda thought more ram and faster ram was kind of useless because I had written off increased speeds as sort of a luxury whose only application is bloated unoptimized software. Boy was I wrong about that. But then why stop there?

I mean, there's a difference between "my IDE opens 0.1s faster" and "my desktop can now write my code for me" and only one of those justifies increasing RAM production.

This. I bought Framework Desktop in November 2025 with almost these exact specs for ~$2.5k

Same spec Framework costs $4k+ today, this is actually cheaper (albeit not as upgradable as framework).

Framework, weirdly, overcharges considerably for their SSDs. You can currently get a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB on Amazon for $390; Framework charges $625 for the Sandisk 850x 2TB, which has similar performance (and is being sold on Amazon for $530).

If you DIY your own SSD, you can spec a Framework Desktop for below $4k; but not much below. Roughly the same price.

If you can supply your own SSD, case, and 120mm fan the mainboard is "only" $3,149

And it was "only" $1700 last year!

I got the EVO-X2 for $1,599! In 44+ years of buying computers, I've seen some appreciation, but nothing like this. Going from $1,599 to ~$3,500 in a year is just insane.

128GB of the most in demand chip on the planet will do that to you.

128GB of the most in demand consumer chip when all the manufacturers are switching to HBM manufacturing because the margins are far better there will do that to you. It sucks.

I was looking at buying hardware for me and as testing ground to learn. With those prices I just nipped out and will just rent in demand at runpod or so.

Absolute insanity

I've never seen appreciation in buying PCs. They were always like cars, once you drive them off the lot...

Well, GPUs sorta went up in the past 5 years.. but nothing like now.

Right. But they shouldn't have :) These are wild times. In the past memory and GPU prices always went down heavily.

And GMKtec just released an EVO-X3 [0] based on the same board but with Oculink. When AMD launched this I thought it was the new chipset that was going to have 192GB of unified memory, but they look to be capitalizing on the inflated premium these "dev" focused desktop solutions.

Regretting not buying the Framework back when it was around $2k.

[0] https://www.gmktec.com/products/gmktec-evo-x3-ai-mini-pc-amd...

I had a pre-order in for the 128GB DIY motherboard only model last Oct 2025, but cancelled it and just upgraded my current 5900x rig to 64GB instead and replaced the x370 board with a used x470. Really with I had pulled the trigger, but I honestly am just fine with the performance as is on my current system for now. The Framework should have lasted me just as long, but who knows. Hoping my current rig lasts at last another 4 years..

A year ago, you could have bought this computer for $2000. Basically double the price now.

I bought a bosgame version for $2199 back in February.

The extremely charitable answer is that this is AMD's chance to control the built-in software, so they can ship a bunch of built-in AI stuff and a controlled environment similar to what NVIDIA does with their DGX OS, rather than e.g. Framework which is going to give you a stock Linux distro.

(I agree that you almost certainly don't need this)

If you're not space-constrained, why go with a Framework Desktop? Just get a normal tower or a server rack computer.

One of the big benefits I’ve heard about for the framework, especially with the Noctua cooler, is that it’s virtually silent.

https://community.frame.work/t/noisy-psu-fan/74751

Well, almost. Maybe. Not all units. But probably.

You can put Noctua fans in server rack computers. I even modified my NAS to use them: https://pics.ealex.net/s/noctua-fans-ftw

It’s tragic that memory is so expensive, and yet, we don’t have chipsets to exploit the bandwidth possibilities of the memory being burnt on these devices.

Absolutely no reason that these need to be capped at 256 GB/s other than shortsighted design from three years ago.

Yeah the 256GB/s bandwidth is really very limiting

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