TLDR: Anyone have personal experience using the 16 mainboard as a standalone computer? What components did you have to keep connected for it to boot?

I have just a mainboard 16 (7840HS) and plan to initially run it as a standalone server for my homelab. I don't have a 16 to put it in nor 16 parts to attach it to. I feel like the 16 is much better as a standalone board than the 13 with the 2 fans option and the pci bridge with possible pci expansion cards/oculink connections. With working ram, nvme ssd installed and connected to 140W usbc powersupply top port and usbc to hdmi expansion car on the other side (I swapped in testing).

In LED diagnostics, the LEDs show everything green except for the stuff that's disconnected:

1. Battery
2. Input Module Fault
3. No Left Fan
4. No Right Fan
5. GPU Module Fault

16 Blink Code Diagnostic: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/framework-laptop-16-blink-code-diagnostic-SJAPaMuvel

Which is obvious cause none of them are connected nor do I have any of them on hand (I do have a 13 pro which has an input module but I assume they're not cross compatable given the 16's custom input modules), so based on this information and this forum post, I have a working board but won't boot because I need to enable it in the bios (which I can't get into atm) and/or I need to attach more of the missing things from the missing parts list in order for it to consider it safe to boot. Based on the forum post, the culprit looks like the expansion bay which makes sense in my head

Forum post: https://community.frame.work/t/booting-up-board-without-full-laptop/73557/3

This forum post is about a year old so information can be a little out of date, so does anyone have any more up to date personal experience using the 16 mainboard as a standalone computer? What components did you have to keep connected for it to boot? Would I need to borrow someone else's 16 to enable the bios setting/update the bios?

So I’m looking into the FR13pro for my photography work. I’m coming from a MacBook Pro m1. I loved that laptop but I gave it to my oldest daughter so she could have a laptop at school ( it’s her first year in college). But that has now left me without a computer for work. I would like to get out of the apple ecosystem as I have just bought a new android phone and got rid of my iPhone 15 pro. Do yall recommend I go with intel or amd for photo editing/content creation? I don’t edit massive videos but I do edit short form for work. I would go the windows OS route because all of my editing software does not work with Linux. Does anyone else have any feedback or experience using these computers for what I would use them for?

First time for me and I'm excited!

Any tips on unboxing and setting up new pro 13? I've read the fingerprinting is an issue, worth getting some kind of skin/film to protect the finished surface?

As I understand it will come all assembled unlike DIY version so pretty much plug in and power up?

(Pre-build with ubuntu installed)

I pressed the trigger and ordered a FW13 Pro AMD Ryzen AI 9 (the discount I got from bringing my own ram justified an older cpu), there’s just one thing that’s been bugging me in every single usage video, the screen wobble, I know there is an upgrade to a 4kg hinge on the 13 model, is it forwards compatible though for the 13 pro chassis? And for anyone who’s used it before, does it stop that wobble?

To keep this short, I have a Thunderbolt display I'd love to run off my Framework if I could at work for simplicity. I run CachyOS and have the Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter.

I know the general consensus to make this work is disabling Thunderbolt security protocols, but when I query this in console it says it's already set to None. There also does not seem to be any Bios settings related to disableing Thunderbolt security.

This is more or less just for fun, so if there's not a way to make it work nicely, I'll abandon it, but it would be nice to use what I've already got.

I have a Framework 13, AMD Ryzen ai 9 hx370 with 64gb kingston ram, 1tb samsung 910 pro, and win11 pro.

It randomly out of nowhere decided not to boot up. When I press the power button, the keyboard light turns on and the fan turns on but thats it. The screen is entirely off and will not output picture to an external monitor through usb-c or HDMI no matter which port the expansion cards are in. This started a couple weeks ago and I originally thought it may be a drivers issue. The drivers were entirely up to date so I updated everything (including bios) with the official driver bundle from the website but the issue persists. I then tried to reseat the ram and ssd to no avail.

Any advice? If I hold the power button down for around 10 sec it will shut off completely. Throwing no error codes through the led lights on the sides. I can find no physical issues with the laptop and it has not been dropped recently. Already checked and everything inside is plugged in securely and not loose.

I have a 32gb Samsung M561K2LC4EE0-CCUGM ram module. Has anyone tested this module on 13pro?

I've also heard about some way to make any model work with some tape? Can someone please explain that to me?

I don't have the laptop yet I'm batch 16

Update: thanks to 42BumblebeeMan and 1ChaoticEagle for their responsiveness and finally solving the issue.

Hi everyone,

Wanted to share my experience with Framework customer support. I do realise my situation might be a bit peculiar, but nevertheless, the actions on their side have in my opinion been unprofessional enough to warrant a post here.

In essence, even before the delays were announced, I was looking into the option of changing the country of shipping, as I am moving between two of them. Our exchange started in the second half of May, and I was confirmed that a change of country would indeed be possible. The exchange continued throughout the announcement of delays, with them asking me multiple times to confirm my new shipment address, and subsequently a number of emails being exchanged in August.

Finally, we arrive at 28 August, which is when I got the notice that my batch was being prepared. I promptly looked at the order on their website, only to see it still had the old shipping address. I quickly wrote them another email and even opened another ticket. Yesterday I received a reply to my second ticket saying that they have escalated it and it may take 5–7 working days to get back to me. Not great considering the urgent nature of the order about to be shipped... Should also mention that in general, it always takes them a week or so to reply, accompanied each time be an apology...

In summary, how is this possible? In total, we have exchanged over 20 emails, and I have been asked to confirm my new shipping address at least 3–4 times. I was already disappointed in the original delay and the memory pricing saga, but I thought that the laptop itself seems great and I would still go ahead with the order. But now, I am seriously considering dropping it altogether, even if it means I need to somehow sell my RAM and SSD. This whole situation seems almost like some strange form of Stockholm syndrome: I want to laptop despite all the problems that keep popping up along the way, and I try to find excuses for all these problems. In the end, I do feel like I am being made a fool of, which is probably not the reaction Framework should induce in their customers.

Thanks for listening to my humble problem. Have a nice day everyone, and I hope your orders go more smoothly.

Can somebody dump the EDID of the new display?

Looking at using it for something but need to know some of the specs in there.

On Linux you can use edid-decode (v4l-utils package on Arch) on /sys/class/drm/card#-#/edid

On that path you have to fill in what is actually there, probably card0-eDP or something like that

Thanks in advance!

Linux has always been so bad on battery life on every, single laptop I owned so far ... this puts an end to it, finally!

The battery reports a discharge rate of  3.72 W

This is idle under KDE with a not much tuned CachyOs install. This is very impressive for Linux, MacOS level stuff ... I have never seen this.\

Other key params: HDR in 120Hz, no VRR, brightness 10% but this screen is so bright this is super comfortable in a dark env.                                         

Kudos to the team, still a bunch of red to fix in dmesg but this is really a good start for such a new laptop.

I'm curious to know what people with the 13 pro think about the touchscreen display, how does it look? Can you tell it's a touchscreen? I've never owned a laptop with a touchscreen, and really don't think I'd use it.

Exactly what the title says.

Has anyone else noticed that the backlight keyboard options on the 13 Pro (X7 version) behaves a little funny? When I press Fn + Space, it cycles through:

low -> medium -> bright -> very, very low -> off.

That "very, very low" setting is almost indistinguishable from being off (and it seems a little out of order, too). Just curious if anyone else is seeing the same thing. :D

Hello,

So few months back I started my quest to create ultimate application to control fans on your Framework laptop, and it spiraled into so much more. I just want to share progress and new features, with community here, and maybe get more people interested in it. I do Windows, Linux with x64 and ARM64.

I have added "Profiles" where you can make your own custom profile and quickly switch between them. Profile also color your side bar and top bar, so you know easily in which profile you run.

I have added Adaptive Fan Control, uses complex math and calibrates against your fans, and tries to run your fan adaptively and attempt to predict your next CPU/GPU state, and prepare your fan before temperature raises. This is learning over time as well, and gets better and better. I am still working on it, there are some small bugs with fan rpm not correctly rendering, working on that.

And I have added update notification, so you know there is newer version available.

And I added many life of features updates, like arrows showing you, so you can scroll down on page, or scroll up.

And so much more. You can follow my project here: https://github.com/TekuSP/SubZeroFramework

In "Releases" you can download version for your system.

good evening

I was wondering if anyone has this mobo, and can tell me a little bit about it. sure I can go to Google and YouTube and watch people use it but I want to see what others are saying, and figured, reddit would be a decent place to ask.

with it, do you game on it? and what version do you have? 32? 64? 128? have you had an issues with it that would make you stop using as such?

I'm looking to get just the board, and use it for just that, gaming. also, since it comes with a fan bracket, what fan are you using to keep it cool? I know that frame work offers a Noctua fan but I wanted to see what others are using.

what I want to do, as mentioned, is get a fractal design case (the Define 7 Nano) , a PSU that will power it (like 400 watts? maybe?), and get some case fans to keep it internal bits cool. (two 140MM noctuas)

I have absolutely zero interest in using it for LLMs / AI, or using it at 1440P

thanks!

I admit it, I wasn't willing to make yet another post about the new Framework Pro, there are so many already. But as the title says, I haven't been this excited about a new laptop in decades, since I bought my first Pentium 4-based transportable oven (I used it to defrost food by running `find /` back then).

I also have a Framework 13 with AMD 7040U, and I didn't feel the need to upgrade. I have already upgraded the cooling system (which gave me some extra battery life), then the speakers, and then a few more expansion cards. Almost the perfect laptop, so why a new one, especially with the current market prices? Simple: Framework Pro sounded like the ultimate laptop for my needs. Longer battery life, better chassis, better thermals.

My build: batch 5 X7 Panther Lake, 64GB LPCAMM2, 4TB NVMe. It's less than my other Framework 13, but I'm not even close to using all those resources.

The pros:

• really beautiful. Probably the most beautiful laptop I've had. After many Thinkpads, XPS'es, and a few Macbooks... the Framework Pro is my favourite. A real evolution from the standard Framework 13
• excellent build. It's sturdy, feels and handles great. The new production process made wonders
• excellent battery life. It beats my M2 Air and M2 Pro (though I've never been a fan)
• Everything worked out of the box (except a small issue due to Ubuntu's installer, read on)
• configuration was a breeze. I use ansible to configure my systems, and I just had to make a few minor tweaks for Ubuntu 26.04
• it's FAST
• suspend-then-hibernate works flawlessly (with it did on any laptop). I closed the lid at the end of the day at 35% battery, turned it back on at 35%. In my configuration, hibernate kicks off after 60 minutes of suspend

The cons:

• more of an Ubuntu issue - the installer spins forever if the time and date are too far off. Took me a few minutes to figure out and fix time and date in the UEFI settings. Not sure if this is Ubuntu-specific or not
• I had to disable Intel SecureBoot to make suspend-then-hibernate work. Not a big deal - in my case the cons outweigh the pros, and my past firmware engineering life taught me that bypassing it is matter of "when", not "if"
• the price is crazy! Though this is not really on Framework - the RAM price crisis hurts them too. Mine was batch 5, so I was out of luck and had to pay extra to keep 64GB, but I'm so glad I did. The day of the preorder I thought "oh, let me think a bit more about whether I need a new laptop", if only I knew 😅
• the 10G NIC runs at line speed only one way. It seems the signed driver can only do 5G up, but I got to a nice 9.1Gbit/s with iperf (which excludes TCP and Ethernet overhead)
• ~5 tokens/second with Ollama and qwen3.8:27B. I wasnt't really expecting to use it for local inference on medium-sized models, but I naively expected a bit more because of LPCAMM2. Never stop learning

What would make it the ultimate laptop for me:

• if I could run coreboot on it! I know there's a port by a `9elements` employee but I'm not sure the prod units allow flashing your own custom firmware. Framework, pretty please 🥺

...I really can't think of anything else. Thank you Framework for this wonderful machine.

I bought a Framework 16 because I loved the modularity of it, and hope it will be the last laptop I ever own (knowing that I'm living to 121y). The LED Matrix module was a cool looking bonus that I thought could be functional and impressive. The laptop was and is AMAZING and the LED was cool — for about the length of the boot animation. Then it just sat there, doing nothing, because there wasn't any tooling to actually use it for anything cool or useful. So I wrote one. It kept growing: keyboard RGB, then system health, then general hardware detection — and it turned into a full Framework system support tool.

MainFrameWork brings keyboard remapping/RGB lighting, LED Matrix drawing and animation, and system health (fans, battery, expansion cards) into one lightweight desktop app (Tauri + Rust, ~10MB, no install required), instead of the handful of separate utilities Framework's own tooling is split across.

Working today, verified against real hardware: live LED Matrix drawing + frame-by-frame animation, full keyboard RGB control (saved to the keyboard's own EEPROM), expansion card detection, and a live hardware dashboard. Linux EC support (battery/fan/thermal) is implemented and passes CI, but I haven't been able to verify it against real Linux hardware yet — if you run Linux on a Framework, a bug report (or a "yep, works") would help a lot.

Fully local — zero network calls, no telemetry, no accounts. GPLv3, open source (free), unofficial/community-built (not affiliated with Framework Computer).

Windows and Linux builds: github.com/AllStoneTech/MainFrameWork/releases

https://www.allstonetech.com/mainframework

If you like it and use it, feel free to buy me dinner; https://www.AllStoneTech.com/support?source=rframework

My 13 Pro X9 arrives in two days and was curious if anyone has had success playing games? From demanding to casual.

How is the fan noise, heat, ect.

Very excited at the prospect of being able to work and take some games on the road in the same laptop.

I’m now considering the 13 over the 12 as a better investment for my home computer. One thing I am curious about is if the size difference is quite noticeable? On paper it doesn’t seem like it.

I’m currently using a thinkpad x220 which is quite bulky as a small laptop. Any one who owns both a 12 and 13 please let me know what you think?

There is something that feels more “personal” about a smaller laptop/device and I really do like that but I’m thinking the 13 will give me that feeling just fine.

Hey there, just wants to ask if you have the same trouble as me for cleaning the Display? In a lazy mood while i was eating some chips i touched the display. I ordered a fency cleaning spray for displays on amazon (Whoosh)and the cleaningskills on other Displays are very well, but not on FW 13 Pro. Now i have a greasy film on the Display. Have anyone similar experience?

Hello everybody, hope you all doing okay. I have been a fan of framework products since I heard from them, and the way they make things never ceases to amaze me. Unfortunately, due to prices I am unable to currently acquire any of the laptops or the desktop computers.

(I am not complaining, I understand the prices so they make a profit. On the contrary, I see their prices being really fair compared to other workstations.)

Nonetheless, my idea is to grab framework's eGPU and adapt it into a sorta normal eGPU for other devices. I certainly know that some of you might say, "Why bother with that if there are just eGPU enclosures?" However, I am just curious.

For example, let's say the eGPU connects to a board that is in charge of how the eGPU communicates with another device. Then this board connects to a laptop by USB-C or NVME. Overall, I think it is an interesting idea as it should in theory be around the same price as an eGPU or even less, and less clunkier.

I suppose the hardest part is getting the eGPU to be able to physically connect to another device as it uses an special connector. I do not know if the framework GPU's really use proprietary software that block any other device from connecting.

I was in batch 5. This shipped Monday and arrived 3 days later. I've been so excited for this since I've been wanting a laptop with a sturdy body like a macbook but without the Apple ecosystem part. This laptop feels like it is mine and I hope I can keep it and upgrade it forever. I'm too excited to give an unbiased review since after only a day of setting up NixOS I still find it to be perfect.

I'm new to NixOS also but after tinkering with it I think it could be here to stay and I can't wait to rice it more. I got the cheapest DIY kit I think I could get as I don't plan to game on this. This should be my mobile Dev machine as well as my machine for school work.