Sep 26, 2026

Framework Desktop vs GMKtec EVO-X2 in 2026: Same 128GB Strix Halo Silicon, Same Price Now

By RunAIHome Team · 14 min read

mini-pcstrix-haloryzen-ai-maxframeworkgmkteclocal-llmhardwarecomparison

TL;DR: The Framework Desktop 128GB ($3,449, no SSD or OS) and the GMKtec EVO-X2 128GB ($3,649.99 on Amazon with 2TB and Windows) run the identical Ryzen AI Max+ 395 at 256 GB/s — token speed is a dead tie at ~31 tok/s on gpt-oss 120B. Add a 2TB drive to the Framework and the two land within ~$200 of each other. That is the whole story: the PCIe x4 slot, 5GbE, Noctua cooling and US support are now essentially free rather than a premium, and the EVO-X2’s edge is that it ships this week with Windows already on it.

Correction (Sep 27 2026): the first version of this article quoted the EVO-X2 at $2,199.99 on Amazon. That was a misread of the price-history page — $2,199.99 was its low between November 2025 and January 2026, not a September price. The same tracker records $3,649.99 as of September 22, 2026. Every conclusion below has been recomputed; the recommendation changed as a result.

	Framework Desktop 128GB	GMKtec EVO-X2 128GB	Beelink GTR9 Pro 128GB
Best for	Linux-first labs, PCIe expansion, clustering	Shipping now, Windows and 2TB included	Dual 10GbE, quietest under load
Price (Sep 2026)	$3,449 + SSD/OS (DIY) — ~$3,650 out the door	$3,649.99 (2TB + Win11, Amazon)	$4,349 direct
The catch	No storage or OS included; stock comes in batches	Was $2,199 as recently as January; that inventory is gone	Launch price was $1,985; today’s is not worth it

Honest take: at the same out-the-door price, buy the EVO-X2 if you want a working machine this week and do not care about the slot; buy the Framework if you want the PCIe slot, 5GbE, a vendor that answers in English, and you can wait for a batch. Neither is faster. When this comparison cost $1,250 the answer was easy — now it is a genuine preference, and “whichever is in stock at a sane price the day you buy” is a defensible way to decide.

The Framework Desktop is the machine everyone on r/LocalLLaMA wants to recommend — repairable-ish, Linux-friendly, made by the company that un-ruined laptops. The GMKtec EVO-X2 is the machine the spreadsheet recommends. Both are built around AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) with 128GB of soldered LPDDR5X-8000, and by late September 2026 they cost effectively the same for the same inference performance. This is the head-to-head for people deciding which set of trade-offs they want, now that price has stopped being the tiebreaker. (Check your own model + context math first in the VRAM calculator.)

Same chip, same bandwidth, same tokens per second

There is no performance section in this comparison because there is nothing to compare. Both machines run the same 16-core Zen 5 APU with the same Radeon 8060S iGPU on the same 256 GB/s of LPDDR5X-8000, and LLM decode speed on Strix Halo is bound by that memory bandwidth, not by cooling or BIOS tuning. ServeTheHome’s measurements across Strix Halo boxes put gpt-oss 120B at roughly 31 tok/s at 120–128W system draw, and that number travels with the chip, not the case. Site canon from our EVO-X2 deep dive applies to the Framework unchanged:

Model class	Type	Expected speed (either machine)
7B–13B (Q4/Q6)	Dense	30–45 tok/s
30B-class MoE (~3B active)	Sparse	70–100 tok/s
gpt-oss 120B	Sparse MoE	~31 tok/s
Llama 3.3 70B (Q6_K)	Dense	~5 tok/s
Qwen3-235B-A22B (Q3, ~101GB)	Sparse (22B active)	~11 tok/s

If a spec sheet or a YouTube thumbnail tells you one of these boxes is “faster for AI,” it’s measuring a Cinebench run, not token generation. The whole 128GB Strix Halo category — Beelink GTR9 Pro, Minisforum MS-S1 Max, Framework, GMKtec — generates tokens at the same rate. You are shopping for a case, a port layout, a support department, and a price.

The price gap, and how each machine got there

Both machines launched at $1,999. They did not stay there, and they didn’t move together.

Framework Desktop 128GB: $1,999 at the February 2025 announcement (Framework’s launch blog). In January 2026 Framework raised it ~$450 to ~$2,459, citing the RAM market — “we held off for as long as we could” (Tom’s Hardware put the base 32GB config at $1,139 after the hike). By September 2026 the 128GB DIY configuration sits at $3,449 — ComputingForGeeks re-verified it this month, with the 64GB build at $1,959. That $3,449 includes no SSD and no OS: storage adds $69–$699 depending on capacity and a Windows 11 Pro license adds $199 if you want one (PCWorld’s review walks the configurator). Call it ~$3,650 out the door with 2TB, on Linux.

GMKtec EVO-X2 128GB: launched at $1,999–$2,199 and took the same crisis repricing. GMKtec’s own store lists $3,499 (1TB) to $3,649 (2TB), and the Amazon 128GB/2TB listing with Windows 11 now matches it at $3,649.99 (price history, checked Sep 22, 2026). It really did sell for $2,199.99 — from late November 2025 through January 2026, with a recorded low of $2,199.98 on January 27. That was channel inventory bought before the DRAM surge, and it is gone. The tracker’s own 520-day average is $2,921, which tells you how fast this product has moved. The DRAM supercycle says those prices do not come back: no analyst projects relief before late 2027. If you see $2,199 quoted anywhere for this machine today, check the date on it.

For calibration: the Beelink GTR9 Pro, the third box in this class, launched at $1,985 and now lists at $4,349 direct (same ComputingForGeeks September check). The entire category is being repriced upward in real time, and all three boxes have now converged in the $3,400–$4,400 band. There is no bargain left in this category — only a choice of trade-offs.

Availability cuts the other way. Framework sells in batches, and the 128GB Desktop has swung between “sold out, next shipment next quarter” at launch, back in stock in December 2025, and out of stock again by July 2026. If you decide the Framework is your machine, check the configurator before you emotionally commit — you may be joining a queue. The EVO-X2 ships from Amazon this week.

What the Framework side actually gives you

Here’s the honest inventory of what’s real on the Framework side, because some of it is real.

A PCIe x4 slot. The Framework mainboard is mini-ITX with an open-ended PCIe x4 slot — unique in this category. That’s not enough lanes to feed a discrete GPU properly, but it takes a 10GbE NIC, a U.2 adapter, or an SSD carrier without touching USB4. The EVO-X2 gives you two USB4 ports and dual M.2 slots, full stop.

5Gbit Ethernet and a cluster story. Framework pitched multi-mainboard clustering at launch — USB4 + 5GbE linking boards to run models bigger than one box holds, and the community has done it: a two-node Strix Halo cluster over llama.cpp RPC running MiniMax M2 and GLM 4.6. Mainboards sold from $799 at launch specifically for this. Temper it: llama.cpp RPC adds capacity, not speed — decode is still bandwidth-bound per node — and 128GB mainboard availability follows the same batch cycle as the full system.

Cooling you choose, and a quieter box. Framework ships a 120mm fan you pick at checkout: Noctua NF-A12x25 (rated 28.8 dBA at full tilt) or Cooler Master Mobius 120P (30 dBA). One 120mm fan on a 120–140W chip is a fundamentally easier acoustics problem than the EVO-X2’s stack of two small CPU fans plus an M.2 fan, which Tom’s Hardware and ServeTheHome measured at 41–43 dBA under dense-70B load. Noctua’s own Framework Desktop tuning guide documents another 5–7 dBA of headroom from fan-curve tweaks. Phoronix’s power deep-dive measured the chip sustaining ~95–120W TDP at 69–76°C with wall draw averaging 100–104W and peaking around 180W — the thermal solution is not the limit on this machine.

A support department that answers in English, and a repair market. Framework is a US company with published repair guides, sold spare parts, and a genuinely active community forum. GMKtec support is the standard Shenzhen-brand experience: it exists, it eventually responds, RMA turnarounds are measured in weeks. If this machine is going to be load-bearing infrastructure in your house, that difference matters — and at parity pricing you are no longer paying extra for it.

What the premium does NOT buy: tokens. Not one more token per second, not one more gigabyte of usable model memory, and — worth saying explicitly — not upgradeable RAM. The LPDDR5X is soldered on both machines; Framework’s own launch messaging conceded signal integrity forced it. The Framework Desktop is the least Framework-like product Framework makes.

Whichever box you buy, the GPU won’t see the full 128GB out of the box. On Windows, AMD’s software caps dedicated graphics memory at 96GB. On Linux, the default kernel GTT limit strands roughly half the pool — models over ~64GB fail to load with ROCm/Vulkan out-of-memory errors even though free -h shows plenty.

The fix (identical on both machines): leave BIOS UMA at Auto/512MB and raise the kernel’s GPU-memory limits in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash ttm.pages_limit=31457280 amdgpu.gttsize=120000"

Then sudo update-grub and reboot. Verify with:

$ sudo dmesg | grep "amdgpu.*GTT"
[    3.211] [drm] amdgpu: 120000M of GTT memory ready.

After this, llama.cpp (Vulkan or ROCm) maps ~120GB on demand — it’s what makes the 101GB Qwen3-235B quant loadable at all. AMD’s ROCm Strix Halo docs recommend the same TTM-parameter approach; the full walkthrough is in our 128GB unified memory guide. Framework’s advantage here is soft but real: its community forum has multiple maintained Strix Halo LLM threads, so when a kernel update moves the goalposts, the fix shows up there first.

Should you wait for the 192GB Framework Desktop?

Framework has previewed a second-generation Desktop on the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 with 192GB of LPDDR5X-8533. As of late September 2026 it is “coming soon” with no price and no date, and Framework has already warned pricing will be a “pretty substantial jump” over the 128GB model — in this RAM market, believe them.

The chip itself isn’t the upgrade the SKU number implies: the Pro 495 is the same silicon with ~100MHz more clock and 8533 vs 8000 MT/s memory — a 6.6% bandwidth bump, which at these speeds means ~33 instead of ~31 tok/s on a 120B MoE. We reached the same verdict on the Minisforum N5 Max’s Pro 495 variant: the extra capacity is real (192GB holds Qwen3-235B at Q4 instead of Q3), the extra speed is a rounding error, and the price will hurt. Don’t wait on it unless a specific model you need genuinely doesn’t fit in 120GB of GTT.

Who should buy which

Buy the Framework Desktop if: you’re running Linux as an appliance and want the vendor to have tested that path; you need the PCIe slot (10GbE NIC without burning USB4 is the killer app); you’re seriously planning a multi-node llama.cpp cluster; or vendor support and parts availability over a 5-year horizon matters to you. These are all legitimate reasons, and they no longer carry a price premium. None of them are performance.

Buy the EVO-X2 if: you want a finished machine rather than a project, and you’re comfortable with mini-PC-brand support. At $3,649.99 it includes the 2TB drive and the Windows license the Framework asks you to supply, which is roughly what closes the gap between them — and it is in stock today, which the Framework often is not. Its 8–14W idle also beats the category if this runs 24/7 (see the 24/7 server math).

Buy neither if: everything you actually run fits in 24GB. A used RTX 3090 at $1,150–$1,350 has 3.6× the memory bandwidth and runs 7B–32B-class models three times faster than any Strix Halo box. The 128GB machines earn their price only when you genuinely need 70B+ dense or 100GB+ MoE models resident. And if you’re not sure your workload justifies $3,600 in hardware, rent first — a 3090 on Vast.ai runs from $0.07/hr, so an evening of testing your exact models costs less than a coffee.

For the coding-assistant side of this decision — using either box as a local BYOK backend for Cline or Cursor — the setups at aicoderscope.com apply to both machines identically, and the open-source serving stack (Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM) is covered at aifoss.dev.

What to actually buy

Prices as of September 2026, all verified in the comparison above:

Your situation	The machine	Price	Where
Want 128GB Strix Halo working this week, Windows and storage included	GMKtec EVO-X2 128GB/2TB	~$3,650	Check price
Need the PCIe slot, Linux-first vendor, or a cluster path	Framework Desktop 128GB (DIY)	$3,449 + SSD/OS	frame.work
Everything you run fits in 24GB	Used RTX 3090	$1,150–$1,350	Check price
Undecided — want to test your workload first	Rented GPU	from $0.07/hr	Vast.ai

FAQ

Is the Framework Desktop faster than the EVO-X2 for local LLMs? No. Same Ryzen AI Max+ 395, same 256 GB/s LPDDR5X-8000, same ~31 tok/s on gpt-oss 120B. Decode speed on Strix Halo is memory-bandwidth-bound, and the bandwidth is identical.

Can I upgrade the RAM later on either machine? No. The LPDDR5X is soldered on both — Framework included, despite the brand. Buy the memory capacity you’ll need on day one.

Isn’t the EVO-X2 about $2,200 on Amazon? It was, between November 2025 and January 2026 — that was pre-surge channel inventory, and it cleared. As of September 22, 2026 the Amazon listing is $3,649.99, matching GMKtec’s own store. Any $2,199 quote you find today is a stale cache or an old article. Check the date before you budget against it.

Does the Framework’s PCIe x4 slot take a graphics card? Physically yes (it’s open-ended), but four PCIe lanes cripple a discrete GPU and the 400W-class power budget won’t feed one. It’s for NICs, storage, and capture cards, not a 3090.

Should I wait for the 192GB / Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 version? Only if you need more than ~120GB of model memory. It has no announced price or date, Framework has warned it will cost substantially more, and the chip is only ~7% faster on bandwidth.

Sources

Last updated September 26, 2026. Prices and specs change — the numbers above were live-checked this month, but verify current rates before purchasing.

Recommended Gear

Products linked in this article:

GMKtec EVO-X2 128GB — the price-per-GB winner of the 128GB Strix Halo class
Used RTX 3090 24GB — faster than any Strix Halo box for everything under 24GB

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