I looked at the Framework Desktop a few week ago; mainly to get something that has nicer gaming performance than my laptop's iGPU. I'm not a big gamer really, but as of late I've been wanting to play some things, like The Witcher 3 (saw thread on Reddit celebrating its 10 year anniversary: "that's the new one I still need to play", so that's about how up to date I am with games – some of these "new" games are already classified as "good old game" on gog.com).

My take-away was/is that the Framework Desktop is a very nice machine, but it is expensive IMHO. You can get better performance at a lower price by building your own machine; in this article the 9950X scores lower than the Max 395, and I'm not entirely sure that's accurate – that wasn't my take-away at all (don't have links at the ready). This is also what you'd expect when comparing a 55W laptop chip vs. a 170W desktop chip.

That said, Linux compatibility is a bit of a pain, for example some MediaTek WiFi/Bluetooth chips that ASUS boards use don't have a Linux driver. In general figuring out what components to get is a bit time-consuming. In one of the videos Nirav mentioned that "just get the Framework Desktop" is so much easer, and 100% agree with that.

In the end, I decided to get a USB4/Thunderbold eGPU, which gives me more than enough gaming performance for me and is much cheaper. I already have a laptop that's more than performant enough for my needs, which I got last year mainly due to some idiotic JS build process I had to deal with last year that took forever on my old laptop. On the new machine it's merely "ludicrously slow". Sometimes I think JS people are in cahoots with Intel and/or AMD...

For LLM stuff the considerations might be different. I don't care about that so I didn't look into it.