Motherboard MXM socket

It would be great to have a motherboard with an MXM socket! This would allow dedicated GPUs, without soldering it to the motherboard.

8 Likes

Absolutely, would be a great addition to a future “gaming edition” framework laptop :slight_smile:

Unfortunately, looking at the chassis design and what the framework team have said regarding thermal management, it looks like 28 watts is the max thermal load. (From the motherboard upgrade blog post: “We’ve designed the thermal system in the Framework Laptop to handle 28W continuous processor load.” So, DGPU is impossible, EGPU is an option, and IGPU will be very limited. Looking at the history of the framework team, the backgrounds are typically from those that eschew the practical might of the GPU and focus on other success criteria (thinness, power management, form factor, portability, upgradability, aesthetics, etc). Considering you can get a gaming laptop with an Intel i5-10300H, NVIDIA 2060 RTX, 8GB RAM, Win10 and 256GB SSD for the base starting price (without any ram, ssd, OS, wifi, or modules) of the DIY framework laptop, I don’t think dedicated graphics is ever going to happen, let alone MXM. :worried:

Unless the team does something wild and introduces another novel idea to expand the footprint they have. For example it could be possible to do a two-part solution, implementing not only a MXM connector on the “underside” of the current mainboard, but also additional mounting for a heat sink/fan. It might be possible to use an idea like this to expand the current mainboard form factor in the z-axis to gain the required space and thermal headroom.

With regards to your last statement regarding cost, this is true, except the advantage of framework’s model is that a “gaming” chassis could be improved with incremental upgrades over an indefinite lifetime (assuming continuous updates by the team), thus improving the value proposition over the laptop you mentioned. If you want a new GPU, you don’t need to replace your whole chassis, motherboard, RAM, SSD, etc.

A final thought: i think it’s worth noting that MXM compatibility wouldn’t benefit only gamers, as I’ve been seeing in discussions in this community. For pro users there are countless workflows where a solid dedicated GPU would be a huge benefit, and MXM modules would allow choice between different workflows which require different cards/graphics APIs. And with ARM and even RISC-V CPUs on the roadmap, MXM compatibility would appeal to a much broader audience than either of those applications (at least in the current market).