12th Gen customer / user experience sharing thread

i7-1280P mainboard / upgrade kit is now out of stock. Quite a few 12th gen units should be in the wild now.

I wonder when it’ll be in stock again.

Hoping to hear some user experience / stories… Everything working well as expected?

My 12th gen i7-1280P laptop arrived a few days ago. So far a very good experience. I installed the latest Ubuntu on a USB-C expansion card without any trouble.
After inserting my NVMe SSD (and removing the USB-C card) I installed Windows 10 (21H2). The Windows 11 driver pack installs all drivers in Windows 10 too, without any trouble. Only a 2 USB controller/devices are not detected with this pack.

update 1
I’ve managed to identify the 2 devices that are unknown after using the Windows 11 driver package:
Hardware ID’s give me:
8086 + 463E
=> Intel Corporation 8086 Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #0 463e
8086 + 466D
=> Intel Corporation 8086 Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #1 466d
So I’ll search for Alder Lake TB4 drivers on Intels site and try those :slight_smile:

update 2
Since the Dell XPS 13 Plus 9320 also uses the Intel Core i7-1280P I scavenged their support site and found:
Intel Thunderbolt Controller Driver
v1.41.1229.0 (A12) January 20, 2022
filename: Intel-Thunderbolt-Controller-Driver_TBTB1_WIN_1.41.1229.0_A12_02.EXE
These work and remove the yellow exclamation marks. So now ALL hardware is recognized in Windows 10.

[will update this post with added experiences]

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Got mine yesterday, I’ve been mostly happy with it.
Currently using Fedora, but also have Windows 11 installed
Fedora has hard locked on me a few times, requiring holding the power button. But this might be more on Fedora rather than the laptop.
The battery drains quickly, I hope this is because I haven’t done any optimizations for Linux yet. I will probably test how long it lasts on Windows soon. But if I can’t get it to last longer this is going to be an issue once uni resumes.
The fan also ramps up quite quickly and you can feel the laptop body being used as a heat sink while typing on it. The fan can get quite loud but it’s not an unpleasant sound.

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I’d recommend using SysRq instead to shut down your laptop and avoid possible filesystem corruption. Naturally this depends on how locked up the system is, and you need to be able to use the SysRq key, which is available on this laptop and bound to Print Screen.

I’ve looked into this somewhat. Take the comparison between a 1260p in the Framework Laptop vs Dell XPS 13 Plus:
Dell 414 minutes (Wifi v1.3)
image

Framework 447 minutes (Wifi v1.3)
image

The Dell has a 4k panel, 55Wh battery, slightly higher PL1 and PL2 TDPs, but they’re both very comparable I would say.

Given this, I don’t think the battery life of the Framework laptop is particularly poor, or worse than similarly spec-ed laptops.

I think it really comes down to power plan / profiles that you choose, which will adjust the TDPs of your system to suit your needs.

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On Fedora specifically, most of the Sysrq functions are disabled by default, so you need to enable them: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Sysrq#How_do_I_enable_the_magic_SysRq_key?

@elfrigo

Mind running some cinebench r23 benchmarks? We dont have much on the 1280P models yet.

You can do it with plugged-in and on best performance mode, for a 10 minute multicore test.

Syncing files slowly and setting up a clean Arch Linux install on a 1260 DIY (64GB RAM, 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD). Besides disabling secure boot, everything has been pretty smooth sailing. I haven’t done much tweaking yet but OOTB it looks like it’s idling at a little over 3W atm.

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Would you mind sharing which RAM modules and which SSD you went with?

The CPU alone, or the system as a whole?

@Luna_VM - I’ve ran Cinenbench R23. Below the results of the tests:



For memory I’m using a set of Kingston FURY Impact 64GB (2x32GB) KF432S20IBK2/64 - it’s the only JEDEC DDR4-3200 kit w/ CL20 (it looks like prices have gone up since I bought it and you can get a CL22 set for almost $100 cheaper now, so probably not worth the premium).

For SSD I bought an INLAND Performance Plus 4TB NVMe 4.0x4 drive. I wanted 4TB of storage and PCIe 4.0, so this was the cheapest decent option. For people who need less storage, the 3.0 Gold P31 is still the best power efficiency/perf king, and the Platinum P41 might be an option for those looking for 4.0.

Both work fine in my Framework.

This was powertop numbers, so the whole system. This was also with no expansion modules plugged in. I only have 3 USB-C modules so I guess idle power will inevitably go up, I might do some tests when I have time/am finished setting up. (I also need to standardize display brightness - I have a colorimeter somewhere so will do that once I have everything sorted).

For better testing I’ll probably write a script that will use a combination of rapl and upower so should get more accurate average idle performance numbers as well as core/package power numbers.

One random power note, I noticed that when I had my USB-C boot stick installed, idle never went below C8 (vs spending a good chunk at C10 when nothing was plugged in). I have a mix of expansion modules I plan to use and some dongles I tend to leave plug in for my wireless kb/mouse so sadly I expect my idle power numbers to be a lot higher once I have everything setup, but maybe I’ll look into the manual disabling of USB ports script floating around.

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btw, for those curious, here’s what the hw-probe looks like for my 12th-gen (2 USB-C, 2 USB-A modules plugged in). HW probe of Framework Laptop #3f71cac385

Nice…so the laptop can idle for some 15+ hours if the numbers are accurate.

Hum…that’s a whole 10% lower score than the Dell XPS 13 Plus:

Timestamped:

@elfrigo Thanks. Thats lower multicore than what I expected, but somewhat still decent.

Still working on filling out some bits, but I’m mostly done with the bulk of my Framework 12th gen review: 2022 Framework Laptop DIY Edition 12th Gen Intel Batch 1 · lhl/linuxlaptops Wiki · GitHub

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Awesome entry, very detailed. One thing I’d point out though (in the Summary):
“works perfectly w/ Linux OOTB

I think this needs an asterisk or two (maybe) around this: 1. Minimum kernel version. 2. Any additional kernel parameters?

There’s also been some reports / workaround regarding using x instead of wayland, plus rebuilding initramfs. i.e. Not so perfectly OOTB.

I’ll change the intro to “Arch Linux” which I think filters out the need for any asterisks. I don’t use any hardware workaround kernel parameters on boot.

It’s useful to link to problems people are having (and I do a lot of that in my doc for the problems I’ve encountered), so thanks for that, but while I don’t usually get all PEBKAC, the issues in that thread looks like installing incompatible drivers for their hardware, which on would expect to cause problems? xf86-video-intel is an obsolete package that literally does not support Intel Xe Graphics hardware. If it’s being installed automatically, then that’s a bug with their distro, but if it’s Arch, you’d have to purposely and manually be breaking it…

It’s impossible to test every distro or combination of software, so obviously everything should probably be caveated with “that I encountered”, or “for the software I use,” but that seems like not a very great way to write and pretty obvious, but if it makes anyone feel better, they can silently mouth that at the end of every sentence they read. :stuck_out_tongue:

For those not overly familiar w/ Linux, rebuilding initramfs is part of how kernel drivers are updated in Linux (if your package manager doesn’t do it for you), so that part is actually Linux functioning “perfectly OOTB” (for Linux, at least).

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Yeah, that would scope the perfection to Arch installs.

The rest…distro-specific.

Update: Came across this just now…not sure how this fits into Arch installations…if it does / doesn’t at all:

…and in the entry, it does state “Maybe the one thin gon Arch Linux that doesn’t work OOTB”…

Nitpicking here, I know. OOTB vs OOTB with minor configuration.