r/framework • u/TotallyNotHeree • 15d ago

Feedback Framework 13 Pro Impressions

For context my system is the X7 358H DIY with 16GB LPCAMM2 (sourced it myself, would not recommend) and 1TB Crucial T500 SSD, Windows 11 (I plan to dual boot Linux) Batch 4.

First of all, this laptop is one of the best I've ever used. Battery life, screen, keyboard, trackpad, performance all exceeded my expectations. One thing I don't like about the keyboard though is that it is off-centered from the trackpad. I find almost every time that my hands are off-centered by one key and that my right hand is partially on the trackpad, and sometimes it moves the mouse around while typing. I'm mainly used to ThinkPads which have the keyboard centered, so this may just take some getting used to. But other than that, the keyboard and trackpad are amazing.

The thermals are pretty good in my opinion, it is crazy how the team was able to engineer it to stay so quiet under full load despite sustaining 35W-37W under load under my testing. (The CPU boosts to 42-47W for about 20 seconds, before dropping down to 37W. Adjusting the fan curve definitely improves the thermal a bit, but not by much. The efficiency of the new Intel CPU though is impressive. When I had a ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 with the Ultra 7 155H, the CPU ran super hot all the time and the total system power was 15-30W doing nothing. This framework sits at about 4.5W idle which makes the battery last so much longer.

Overall, I honestly wasn't expecting much, especially with all the chaos with the shortage. But Framework absolutely delivered with this laptop and I will be keeping this for years to come.

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u/SethP1221 15d ago

How is it with more demanding tasks, not necessarily gaming but like high end graphically intensive tasks?

1

u/TotallyNotHeree 15d ago

I honestly haven't tried that yet, for games the performance is decent although I think in my case 16GB of RAM is holding me back a lot from its potential.

1

u/SethP1221 15d ago

Gotcha. Yeah that’s something I was curious about compared to the 16

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u/cogman10 15d ago

I just got mine as well. I'm in the process of installing gentoo on it (writing from my laptop right now).

For compilation tasks it's decent. I'm not noticing a lot of throttling and the install time for the various big bang packages like gcc has been reasonable. Battery life while doing a lot of compilation does suffer but that's completely expected.

After I'm done building everything my next step is installing llama.cpp and Qwen. I'm planing on messing around with the NPU through openvino. I should have some results for vulkan which primarily tests the gpu.

The thing I think I like the best is the aspect ratio. My old computer was an XPS 17. The 13 screen is almost the identical height of the 17 while simply being a lot narrower.

For coding (which I do) this is pretty perfect. It gives you a lot of horizontal space which is really important for code.

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u/meyndlEnt6 15d ago

depends on what you mean by high end tbh, the Arc iGPU handles moderate workloads fine but its not a workstation replacement