First you get style, then you get the customisation, then you get the gaming power.
The new AMD mainboard gives it the gaming prowess of a modern handheld PC and greater power and efficiency than the far more expensive Intel Framework boards, too. This is the pinnacle of Framework's 13-inch design, possibly the ultimate hybrid gaming ultrabook, and a laptop I now have a genuine affection for.Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you.I love the Framework 13 laptop.
That GPU power translates here to the Framework 13, giving it genuine 1080p gaming performance at Medium, and sometimes even High graphics presets. Even more so if you're playing games with AMD's FSR upscaling tech at play, or even Intel's agnostic XeSS. And that includes a lot of modern PC games right now.that sits alongside its FSR 3 rollout. Which is a shame.
And that's just the integrated GPU performance; this is still an eight-core Zen 4 CPU at its heart, with a full 16 threads of processing power and a heady measured 4.9GHz clock speed in this svelte chassis. That means it's a pretty monstrous processor that would have been high-end desktop level just a few short years back.
In multi-threaded tasks, where you'd expect the higher Intel thread count to score a win, it's the AMD chip which pulls ahead, whether that's in Cinebench or Blender rendering, or HD video encoding. And this here is the beauty of the Framework model. You could have bought that 11th Gen Framework 13 machine years back, and by dropping in this AMD board and some new memory and you've suddenly got a huge upgrade in performance and efficiency. It's not aupgrade by any means, but it's way less than the cost of an equivalent new laptop and with considerably less ewaste.
That level of upgrade cycle makes it like the desktop PC market in a way, and in a way that has made me feel far more affection for the Framework 13 than any other laptop I've used. This chassis, keyboard, SSD, and screen have been through generations of Intel and AMD silicon with me, and I love this little system.