Hey Guys, I’m an intel guy but all my research says that AMD is the way to go for battery life and performance. I plan on buying the base model of either. The month or two wait is not an issue for me, so I’m just worried about performance and battery life, or quirks (battery drain etc…). Any suggestions would be helpful.
I can say that I’m getting 10 hours with reasonable screen brightness with the 7840u. Samsung 990 pro is my SSD but people claim the SK Hynix one is really power efficient.
Honestly, both are pretty close. If you care at all about graphics, you want the AMD. If the battery is all you care about, they are tied a bit.
Get about 8 hours (55wh battery) on high screen brightness with a sn770 1tb and windows 11 in power saving mode.
It’s a really efficient laptop my use case right now: external monitor 1440p 165hz via displayport, 20 chrome tabs one Ubuntu vm, word, teams, Spotify, discord, file explorer and HW monitor calculates a total battery loss of around 12 watts
CPU performance is in the same ballpark. Intel is a tad better at single-core, Ryzen is better at multi-core. You won’t be unhappy with either.
Ryzen appears to be somewhat better for battery life. But no Framework configuration is a champion in that category, in part because of the socketed RAM. LPDDR4X and LPDDR5X use less power than standard DDR4 and DDR5 but they’re not available in modules, they have to be soldered onto the motherboard. (I think the issue is the super-low voltages they use; there isn’t enough noise margin for socketed memory.) I’m willing to accept that in exchange for easy repair and expansion.
The Ryzen 7000 series blows 13th generation Intel out of the water at graphics performance; you can expect somewhere near double the frame rate at comparable game settings if the game is GPU-bound. (14th generation Intel may get them back in the game [sic] but that hasn’t been announced yet; based on Framework’s past record it will come in spring or summer 2024.) If you care about graphics you’ll want to switch the Ryzen BIOS to gaming mode; that allocates 4 GB to graphics instead of 512 MB. If you have only 16 GB of RAM you might want to switch back and forth (requires a reboot) depending on what you are doing; if you have 32 GB or more just leave your system in gaming mode all the time, you’ll still have plenty of RAM for everything else.
AMD is more energy efficient (definitely under load, not sure about idle and near idle), but has significantly worse IO, especially for a device with only 4 USB-C ports that are supposed to be as universal as possible. Much of that universality is lost with the AMD variant and there are 3 different types of ports with different amounts of universality/capabilities.
Plus AMD has a history of their firmware and drivers not being quite ready and stable on launch. But you could argue that the post-launch firmware update was already a major step towards stability and it’s a mobile platform with limited modularity, so that there are not tons of different variants that could be untested / unstable and yet to be discovered.
You’ll have to decide whether IO or performance / energy efficiency is more important.
Both Intel and AMD advertise new display output capabilities (DP UHBR10 and faster) for their CPUs, but to my knowledge FW did not implement this in either variant (and I am not sure if it would even be possible, given that no other device so far has claimed support for it), so the IO differences seems to be rooted mostly in amount of display-capable outputs, USB4 ports and display-support on those USB4 ports.
I mean, I would probably almost never connect a display. But in the odd chance I did, like to a tv to share pictures, I’d want it to work. But like, if the IO issues are just 25% slower USB transfer speeds, then I don’t care. I guess I’m not sure what you mean by “worse IO”.
Important to note that most reviews in the wild are going to be of the top models of each generation. Most hard data from base models are most likely going to be coming from the community.
I would like to submit Just Josh’s review on Youtube if you have not seen it yet. Yes, unfortunately it is based on the top models of the Framework Intel 13th gen and AMD.
One major takeaway was that Just Josh said that the better efficiency of the AMD chip allowed the fans to spin up less frequently and more quietly as the chip didn’t get as hot. He felt that was holding the Intel version back, but the AMD made him bump the Framework from a laptop he didn’t really like into a recommended laptop.
Just upgraded 12th gen i7 to 7840U and can confirm that Ryzen handles much better under load. Compiling a rather big Angular project keeps i7 at 100° and 65° afterwards, while Ryzen goes up to 79° only and then drops to 50°. Also initial compilation time is lower on Ryzen with 12 seconds vs 14.5.
What do you plan to do with it because I was pleasantly surprised that my intel 13th Gen i5 was like 10-20% faster in single-core benchmarks than the Ryzen models.
(I think it was even 10% faster than the R7 but don’t remember for sure).
Since single core is what matters for most tasks of basic users, this may matter for you too.
I have the Framework 12th gen, I am also considering between Intel or AMD for my switch. However, for Intel comparison, I am waiting for Intel Meteor Lake for battery life and graphics performance before I decide.
That being said, my Framework is on loan to my relative at the moment for school. Once it is back, I’ll probably do my own tweaks for Alder Lake and check out battery life. Still wonder if CPU scheduling could be better.