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.
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.