I give a lot of my time and intern with an Organization that Supports and runs events for High School Esports in Michigan, the Michigan High School Esports Federation, and the idea came through my brain the other day: What if instead of a school purchasing 6 new Standalone PC’s every 5 years for their players, what if I could make a Mini or regular server-rack-mounted Server Blade system that can function like a Server Blade system? It would compact the form factor and deskspace usage to 1 rack, while consisting of Framework Main boards and PCI slot risers for easy upgradability down the line? I was wondering if you guys possibly had any input or ideas as to the feasibility, performance, and just how usable this might be? I am looking to keep the price-per-pc down to sub-$1,000 while providing competitive graphics at 1080p 165hz+, games like LoL, Valorant, Overwatch, Rocket League, and R6: Siege.
For pure gaming you are probably better off going with regular pcs if you can live with the bulk.
I have my own PC, I am trying to put together something affordable and compact for High Schools to use for students wanting to put together a team for Esports titles. Most High Schools cannot afford the amount of permanent space that full PC setups require, if they are using multi-use classrooms.
A regular minipc mounted to the monitor is probably still a better option than anything framework. The laptop mainboards can be run without a battery but from my experience with playing with the ec of the 13 it doesn’t really like it and also doesn’t have much usable pcie to do any risering. The board of the 16 is waaay to expensive to be used as a minipc.
You could do minipc bolted to the screen (there are some with dgpus that have quite a bit of grunt) or just build little mini atx (itx tends to be much more expensive and not that much smaller) and just put them away when not used as you would with the screen, keyboard and mouse (and mousepad and headset and wheatever) anyway.
Yeah… an off-the-shelf mini-atx build would be hard to beat.
Stuffing 13” mainboards into a server blade system would be incredible, SO COOL, and I’d love to see Framework make their stuff more compatible with that … but right now they’re not.
I put my old Intel mainboard in a Coolermaster, and it’s fine. I then put my old AMD mainboard in another coolermaster, and it took a ridiculous amount of effort. Had to swap it back into a laptop chassis twice. Browse these message boards for people trying it.
Can it be done? Yes. Is it worth it? Nope, probably not. But it would be great to see this improve in the future… and the new Deskop parts might help.
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