How Are The Framework Laptops? - My Experience

Recently I purchased a framework 16 after their latest press release announcing a new framework 12, new keyboards, a desktop and new framework 13 mainboards bringing Ryzen AI 300 to the framework 13.

Going into this purchase I was quite worried due to more then a few recent reviews on Reddit showing issues, but I just went "f*** it, we ball", and purchased it anyway.

The Build:

I bought my framework DIY, omitting the RAM & Storage as ill be bringing it myself, I bought the regular keyboard & track pad plus their respective spacers, two USB C (one orange, one lavender), two USB A (just metal lol), one SD & one HDMI port.

All this, with no GPU expansion because I didn't need it at the time.

Bought a Crucial 64gb DDR5 kit (2x32) from a local PC store (refer to RAM guide on frameworks website) and used an old 1tb SSD I had from my last laptop.

Combined with a AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS lead to a fricken banging laptop for Programming, Spreadsheet Work, and UI Development.

Assembly

Assembling the device was truly amazing, there are step by step guides for the entire device, I didn't need an external screwdriver because one comes in the box, it took me about 30 minutes because of my uncle’s diking about (love you theio)

The guides were super intuitive and helpful with video recordings for each step, and the internal design is fantastic, they slipped two SSD slots in one little area which was amazing and overall I’m super happy with the experience.

Battery life

Lets be real, battery life on X86 based systems isn’t great, the framework 16 running Arch Linux with Hypr out of the box had about A 6-8 hour battery life, which is pretty good but Isn't fantastic, when programming or doing anything intensive, battery life drops down to 4 or less hours.

I solved this by autistically obsessing over power draw for a few days by going to town with TLP and the BIOS settings to reduce my idle power draw from 15 or so watts to 5.5 with 20% brightness

Now keeping in mind this does make CPU performance go down the gutter a fair amount, we can make multiple profiles and change them as we go which is what i did, so now my battery life during productivity tasks on avg went from 4 hours to 10, if you keep the largest power saving mode on the entire time, 14 hours is the max I've seen. (I’ll write a blog post later detailing how to use TLP on any Linux system to save power)

Repairability & Build quality

Of course the repairability of this thing is nuts, I’m able to take my keyboard apart and move it into any position I want, I’ve already had several situations where being able to move around IO came in clutch, and being able to buy a DGPU after the fact is genuinely amazing

Now reading Reddit posts i was very concerned about build quality but when i got the device i was truly impressed, the spacers don’t fit perfectly but are pretty close, after some heating and cooling cycles they got damn near flush, the spacers are fantastic, the monitor is not nearly as flimsy as i was worried to be, its really not noticeable, the camera and microphone buttons are fantastic and are actual hardware locks, when activated, my power draw drops by half a watt for the both of them which is fantastic.

Linus Tech Tips mentioned the keyboard being super mushy and flexible in the center during their review, since then I'm happy to report that framework has solved this issue, or at a minimum, did with my laptop xD

Performance

In the current rust project I’m working on, compiling the backend from scratch including dependencies on a base model M4 mac mini takes 2 minutes and 30 seconds, this laptop on power profile (all power settings set to max) will compile the same code in 2 minutes and 28 seconds thanks to the extra cores and threads. I haven't really tested gaming, the integrated DGPU seems to handle war thunder pretty well allowing for me to play on high graphics at about 100 FPS, I cannot comment on the DGPU just yet as I don't have it.

Conclusion

I could not be happier with my laptop, the anti glare display is fantastic, the CPU is killer, and the battery life is pretty good after some tweaking and the boot times are fantastic thanks to arch, mine boots from cold in under 10 seconds. All this with the fantastic build quality, guides and general experience, the only thing I could complain about would be the price, which, is only 100 - 300 AUD more then similarly speced laptops (when you buy DIY) which I think is a price most are willing to pay for the sheer open-ness and repairability