TL;DR: 128gb Machine working very well on Windows 11, with no BSODs, crashes, or noisy fans!
Before purchasing my 128gb machine, I read quite a few posts about different issues encountered on both Windows/Linux setups - and therefore purchased with a slight degree of nervousness.
However, based on my own experience, I think a lot of this information might now be out of date and can give a misleading impression for newbies. I therefore just wanted to give an up-to-date review of where things are with my new machine …
My setup:
- Initially I installed Windows 11 with Framework supplied driver pack and 1.05 BIOS and have been trying out various AI tools - Lemonade, LM Studio, but mostly ComfyUI.
- After a few days of stable running, I decided to upgrade the drivers (mostly so I could try the latest version of ROCm - v7.14 - which supposedly had good performance improvements, but relies on latest Adrenalin drivers).
Taking a cautious approach - before upgrading I created a recovery USB drive and took restore points of both my drives, just in case this caused instability.
I then upgraded Adrenalin & Chipset drivers to latest versions and then installed ComyUI portable version (which allows you to install latest builds of ROCm drivers). I then installed latest ROCm, following this guide:
I’m please to say, setup was relatively painless and I’ve seen no stability issues since upgrading. No BSODs, crashes, freezes etc. But the best bit I’m now seeing 20-30% performance improvements on generative AI tasks - compared to running ComfyUI desktop with default ROCm.
I may have just been lucky (or maybe later revisions of the hardware have been improved) - but I’ve not experienced the noisy fan issues that others have. Overall, I’ve not regretted my purchase at all (I only regret not buying earlier in the year when I could have saved £££).
NB: I’m mostly doing local LLM work and not playing any AAA games. I’ve also only had the machine for two weeks, so may not have encountered some issues yet - but so far so good! Also, before you ask - no I don’t work for Framework 