Molecular Rendering, Video Game Development - Can the desktop AI Max+ 395 do it?

Framework Desktop
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I’m sitting on a lot of anticipation anxiety about the desktop form factor that is being designed by Framework. I don’t want to annoy the development team directly by emailing with a long list of questions, and I think it’d be fair to dump my questions here. I’m a gamer from the US, and have dreamed of working with complex 3D rendering that’s usually reserved for the highest of high end hardware. I’m not that well off unfortunately, so I’ve usually had lower end computer systems. Of course, making do is what we as humans do. Here are my questions regarding the processing.

Is the AI Max+ 395 powerful enough to render molecules, cells, 3D spaces, etc on Blender, ChemDraw 3D, Unreal Engine, etc?

Will future games like GTA6 struggle to run on the 395?

Is Windows 11 the best option for all applications I’ve already listed?

Does the PCIe X4 slot on the board support GPU’s like the ASRock RX 6500 w/ PCIe 4.0 x4 (Or the Matrox LUMA Pro Series A380P which has a x4 plug as well.)?

Can the board be installed into any ITX case, or just the case sold by Framework?

Is the chip capable of simulating real-time models? For example, hurricanes, floods, etc.

Will all the AI components (the chip itself) be able to help me with my work if I’m not exactly doing LLM’s (at least not right away because I’m not involved in that field at any capacity yet.)

I enjoy modding Fallout New Vegas and have gotten really good at establishing stability with very demanding content-mods in order to do my own quality testing (Like the Crisis 07’ test). Baseline is of course the vanilla game, and compare from there. In the case of the game crashing the entire system, what is the likelihood my test methodology will completely destroy the AI Max 395?

That was my last question. I’d like to here opinions on that before I even buy the board because if it can’t even run FNV heavily modded, then I may want a different system. Thank you Framework and community!

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Moved your thread under Framework Desktop category instead of community developers.

While I can not answer every single question here, I’ll do my best.

Is the AI Max+ 395 powerful enough to render molecules, cells, 3D spaces, etc on Blender, ChemDraw 3D, Unreal Engine, etc? - probably but we haven’t tested it yet. I recommend checking other products with the same APU.

Will future games like GTA6 struggle to run on the 395? - game is not out yet, we do not know. but you can check the benchmarks for couple of existing games.

Is Windows 11 the best option for all applications I’ve already listed? - not a framework question :slight_smile:

Does the PCIe X4 slot on the board support GPU’s like the ASRock RX 6500 w/ PCIe 4.0 x4 - it is a standard slot.

Can the board be installed into any ITX case, or just the case sold by Framework? - any case. however most cases don’t have two front USB-C ports, you might lose some ports here. I think we already shared some additional information (about sizing) for using 3rd party cases.

Not sure about your other questions.

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I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to answer my silly questions haha. You have provided a lot more answers than I could ever afford really. I watch a lot of content and read a lot about what people are doing with these incredible AMD chips. Unfortunately, very few people out there are working with molecular rendering, cells, etc. Tbh I’m in an Atomic Chemistry class and it has been quite the endeavor.

I should clarify that another huge reason I’m interested in the desktop version is the power efficiency, I don’t want such outrageous electricity bills during this economy. The questions are definitely amateurish and telling of my noobie position. I need to fully understand, the slot in the photo on the site looks like it’s a x4 sized PCIe slot. You say standard, does that mean it is a PCIe x16 sized slot? I genuinely do hope I’m incorrect hahaha.

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The nice thing about a forum is someone probably answered your question. And if you like the FW Desktop just search this category.
For the PCI-E slot look here: PCIe Open Ended Slot Request

And no offense for a first time forum FW forum user. It can be hard to use the first time. Nonetheless I welcome you to the FW Community.

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No it’s a standard 4x slot. To be able to insert a 16x card, you’d need an adapter/riser card that converts 4x to 16x (or to an open endex x4 slot). Like this: Amazon.com: XRIKUI PCIe x4 4.0 Riser Cable,PCI-Express 4X Female to Female Extension Cable PCI-e Extender Adapter 20CM_Dual 90 Degrees : Electronics

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That’s true, I want to learn as much as I can and having that certainty is important. This kind of product is a huge investment for someone like me (biggest investment in my life lol).

Thank you for the welcoming!

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I’m certainly not looking forward to working with Riser Cables to hook up full x16’s to it haha. Maybe a glance at this card and a judgement call could be made? I genuinely have never seen anything like it in my life, so I’m leaning towards believing this is a completely fake product (scams are everywhere in 2025 lol) Matrox LUMA Pro Series A380P - Graphics card - Arc A380 - 6 GB GDDR6 -

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I was hasty to suggest I won’t use the Riser cable for sure. I want that x4 slot to be open for networking, and converting an NVMe slot to a PCIe x16 slot. This product would work as well, or is it not the right product?

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That should also work if you want to use the nvme slot instead of the PCIe x4 slot.

However I think it would make more sense to use the nvme slot for a SSD and the pcie slot for something else.

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Does the framework mainboard come with ethernet? If not, then configuring for connectivity will require that I use something like that M.2 → x(4-16) cable.

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Yes, it comes with 1x RJ45 - 5 Gbit Ethernet

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Wow that’s awesome, would this be a good option for the mainboard then? Amazon.com: Cablecc PCI-E Express 4X to 16x Extender Converter Riser Card Adapter Male to Female : Electronics

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Electrically that would work, but mechanically it would be difficult to fit into cases and you couldn’t install larger cards into that slot because the ATX 24 pin socket is very close to the PCIe port. That’s why I suggested the riser with the cable above. Then you can just get a standard uATX case and fit in both the mainboard and card. (A heavy card will need some DIY for mechanical mounting though).

Or just get a case with the option for a riser buildin. (But make sure it’s 4x compatible or use the 4x to 16x adapter you linked plus thr x16 extension cable that comes with the case.)

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I’m not looking into any heavy cards, just anything AMD (I want a fully matching system with that Strix Halo chip.)

Will the Strix Halo chip still utilize it’s VRAM when I am utilizing a GPU through a riser cable?

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To be sure I’m reading regading the specs this cable and the 4x slot correctly; that’s a maximum of 8 gigabytes per second, not gigabits right? If so, shouldn’t that be 16?

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It’s ~8GB/s for 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Source: PCI Express - Wikipedia. The Framework’s PCIe should be PCIe 4.0, since that’s what the APU supports.

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For anyone in doubt / not familiar with the difference in notations. I just looked it up:

  • GB/s (uppercase “B”) typically stands for Gigabytes per second
  • Gb/s (lowercase “B”) for Gigabits per second.

The linked Wikipedia page says ~8GB/s (Gigabytes/s) for PCIe 4.0 x4.

According to the page PCIe 4.0 x16 is ~31.5 GB/s

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Just came here to say that you can do video game development on anything. Your smart phone, a raspberry pi, etc.

If you constrained, for whatever reason, by specific compilation times, or some other solid metric than can be quantified then please share that. Video game development is not a metric that amounts to much.

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To be fair, if I wanted to develop a video game just for the sake of it, I wouldn’t bother with any of my own ideas and shoot for coding Pong. That game is possible to write out and render in my current situation.

However if I want to actually realize my ideas, unfortunately, either I need to win big in a lottery or build a very powerful system that can render the world spaces I want to build. Large 3D spaces with 4K textures, complex lighting, building assets like firearms for FPS, or cars/trucks for a racing game. I hope it makes sense, even my gaming rig struggles pretty bad in Blender, Unreal 5+, etc.

And it is solely a gaming rig of course, I did my course work on it too but I can do it on my laptop too. Coding can be done on any device fs, I agree, rendering and modeling is unfortunately not a luxury I’ve been able to afford. Until this year anyway.

TBH it’s beyond ambitious to want to build AAA games solo but I mean, look at Bodycam, or Superhot (both extremely well designed video games!) unfortunately my CPU can’t handle playing either game, my GPU is fine playing them on medium settings. And of course I never do ray tracing because the 3070 isn’t the most powerful for that kinda stuff.

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Would a non-gaming GPU be even good with a converter?