I’m planning to put together just about the cheapest possible config for the FW 12. For the testing I’ll be doing, I’ll be installing Windows 11 ( ). So keep that in mind.
If anyone is on the fence about whether or not the cheapest FW 12 setup possible will be enough for your use case, what would you like me to test out with it? Keep in mind, I don’t want to spend a fortune on software, and I know basically nothing about coding or AI models, so I won’t likely be any use on that front. But if you want me to see if it will edit a certain type of video file in Davinci, or if there’s a (hopefully cheap, lol) game on Steam that you think might run but aren’t sure, or whatever, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Obviously, not until I actually have the computer. But I’m planning to make a list of what all I want to test out and I thought I’d ask here as well.
I think the cheapest configuratin should be able to run about everything. I have been using a MNT Reform for a couple of years. I was able to run nearly everything on within reason. Obviliously I wasn’t playing triple A games on it but I have also used several Celeron and Pentium cpus in Surface products and they were all capable enough. I would guess that you will be hard pressed to find something you truly cannot run.
I agree. I just thought it might be nice to put it into perspective for folks with software they are concerned about.
The fact that the 1315u is faster than high end, desktop gaming CPUs from less than 10 years ago says a lot.
Also, for context, I’m going to see how cheaply I can put a DIY together, so it will have 8GB of RAM and an older, slow-ish, 256GB SSD.
Basically, the new FW 12 isn’t all that cheap. So I wanted to put it through its paces in basically the cheapest config (within reason. I’m not buying no-name RAM and SSD).
What exactly do you mean when you say bottleneck? Based on your simulations, do you have a recommendation for a max RAM/ SSD capacity? Or is the bottleneck the other way around
Would 2TB storage and 64GB of ram be enough or do you need more? Untill they make bigger 2230 ssds or ddr5 sodimms that’s the max you could currently stick in a 12.
Not even a little. My next newest computers are a Haswell Xeon E3-1270v3 (2014 build) and a Thinkpad with an i5 7200U (7th gen). I’m actually kinda shocked to learn that so many other people are chasing the computer-upgrade dragon so often that a 13th gen CPU is not essentially brand new
Oh okay I think I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you meant that you simulated what the FW12 would be like. No, you were saying that for running SolidWorks it’s dependent on the RAM/ SSD and not the processor?
I think most computers these days are basically overkill for light tasks. I tried a Chromebook with a passively cooled, 4 watt Mediatek processor, and for stuff like web browsing, YouTube, word processing, etc., it was totally fine. Sure, it wasn’t quite as “snappy” or smooth with some things as faster computers, but it’s sufficient for my daily uses. Gaming is one area that an “average” computer simply won’t do as well with, especially if you want to push high resolutions, and/or ray tracing and other eye candy. But I think most people realize pretty the FW 12 isn’t a gaming machine.
And even with gaming, it really doesn’t take insane processing power to be “good enough.” I think the Steamdeck is good evidence of that.
But still, I expected more people to be hesitant about the reduced performance of the FW 12, especially for the price. It seems like with every new FW 13 mainboard release, there are people asking “will it be fast enough for ____ ?” Stuff like video and photo editing, certain games, etc. I suppose the slightly shifted market for the FW 12 means that fewer folks are looking at the FW 12 with the intention of doing anything intensive, so the performance is less of a concern.
The i3-1315 (lower SKU) is already nominally faster than the Steam Deck’s CPU - by a small margin. Keep in mind that this applies only to the CPU part of the Chip NOT the iGPU part.
Both iGPUs (i3 as well as i5) will get crushed by the Steam Deck’s VanGogh APU of course.
Anyway, both SKUs (i3 as well as i5) are good offerings in the 2-in-1 convertible market. They get crushed by Apple Silicon, but Apple isn’t offering a 2-in-1 solution. (Some could consider an iPad with Magic Keyboard combo as a 2-in-1.)
When you’re performing a productivity task, like finite element analysis, you choose how granular you want your model to be. If your model has too many elements, it can get too large to store in memory. More RAM is the answer.
The numbers still need to be crunched, so a large model will take much longer to process. Not much can be done here to improve things on the FW12.
I have an old MacBook with double the supported memory capacity, so maybe you are right.
For my work I use an i7-10850H 32GB laptop. That is a little faster than an FW12, but I do my CAD work on it with ease. So, I think that it will run smoothly on an FW12 too.
Are you sure? I know Passmark isn’t the end-all, be-all. It won’t represent every application or real-world use. But the i3 ranks similar in multi-threaded, the i5 slightly higher, and both FW 12 processors rank quite a bit faster in single-threaded performance (than the 10850H). The single channel vs. dual channel RAM might be a slight deficiency, but it is 5200 DDR5 vs. 2933 DDR4. I don’t know how all that would shake out.
In general, I wasn’t really trying to argue with this thread that the FW 12 would or wouldn’t be powerful enough for everyone. I just know that, at least if you want Windows 11 (well, assuming you pay for a legit copy), the cheapest you’ll get a DIY or pre-built FW 12 is about $800 USD, before sales tax. I figured there would be some people on the fence, wondering if, for their use case, the performance would be good enough for the money, given the advantages the FW 12 offers over the competition, or if they’d be better off putting that money towards something with a bit better performance per dollar.
Just killing time while I wait for it to release, basically.
The jump from 10/11th gen to 12/1th was pretty big but depending on how much power the push through that 10850h it may still be decently faster than the fw12. My work dell can push like 80W continuously (and a lot more peak) into a 11th gen 8 core and that can just barely match my 7840u fw13 running at 35W at cb15.
). So keep that in mind.
