AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370 vs AMD Ryzen™ Al 7 350

Framework Laptop 16
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Hey everyone,

I got a Framework 16 for my brother. It’s arriving on Monday. I can’t wait to set it up for him and run some benchmarks. I opted for the AMD Ryzen Al 7 350 with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU, mostly to save money on an already expensive laptop. He’ll use it mostly for gaming, along with some light productivity tasks. I’m thinking/hoping that most of his games are GPU-bound and not CPU-bound or memory-bound (meaning that the framerates are limited because the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU is the framerate bottleneck, and not because the CPU is failing to keep up feeding the GPU). All of the professional reviews I have seen so far have been with the AI 9 and 5070 GPU, so I’m curious to see how the AI 7 stacks up.

Update: The laptop came early. Here are some benchmarks of the AI 7 350 compared to those posted of the the AI 9 HX 370 by PC Magazine. As expected, the AI 7 350 scored very close to the AI 9 HX 370. In some cases, my brother’s AI 7 350 laptop scored slightly better than the AI 9 HX 370 review model, which I attribute to newer BIOS/drivers. Both systems have 32 GB of RAM.

Benchmark AMD Ryzen Al 7 350 AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
3DMark (Wild Life Subtest) 76,125 77,415
3DMark (Wild Life Extreme Subtest) 23,946 24,289
3DMark (Steel Nomad Subtest) 2,917 2,737
3DMark (Steel Nomad Light Subtest) 13,808 13,429
3DMark (Solar Bay Subtest) 61,943 59,521

For fun, I also ran the 3DMark Speed Way subtest, which PC Magazine did not run, likely because that test is designed to test high-end gaming desktops, not laptops. On that test, the system scored 3, 414, with an average 34.15 frames per second.

On another note, with fewer cores, the AI 7 should theoretically consume less power and thus provide more more battery life, for the laptop, but I’ve noticed that both CPU’s have the same default 28W TPU, with the same configurable range of 15-54W.

AMD spec sheets:

AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370

AMD Ryzen™ Al 7 350

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This doesn’t directly answer your question - I don’t have any benchmarks comparing the 350 vs the HX 370 - but a couple of thoughts:

One of the sacrifices when choosing the 350 over the HX 370 is a limited iGPU. Considering the 5070 dGPU, I don’t think this will be any sort of factor for your brother!

The other main sacrifice would be fewer cores in the 350. The machine might be a bit slower than a machine with the HX 370 when running many concurrent programs, but I’d think this is not a self evident issue. If you had two machines on-hand, one with the 350 and one with the 370, you could certainly find some performance enhancements with the latter, but I’d be surprised if someone could identify slower abilities with day-to-day usage.

I don’t know what kind of games your brother plays, but anything with new-age graphics will be GPU bound. If I were to guess, I’d say you made a solid decision.

EDIT: I suppose Minecraft would perform better on the 370, but it’s not clear to me if there will be any noticeable limitations with a 350 machine.

I’d expect that you’re right about better power consumption with the 350 model. User reports on reddit seem to indicate as much, but that’s not too scientific.

Cool frickin gift! I bet your brother will be stoked.

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I updated my OG post with some benchmarks. I’ll be able to do some gaming benchmarks on Tuesday night, when he isn’t home.

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