I was wondering if there is any chance the team could remark on the battery life achieved in the notebookcheck review? It’s a bit concerning that it’s on par with the 4 year old i7-1165G7:
And less than half of the MacBook Air M2.
Is it possible that something could be improved via drivers/software? Or
definitely, software and SoC driver will improve that. Using Linux too
Lot of reviews are actually wrong for me. because my 7840U can last 23h in idle (under linux with power saver). but they said 12h.
You really can expect better battery life with update and better operating system (windows is very hungry and then CPU cannot sleep)
It’s unclear what happened in the Notebookcheck review, given that most other reviewers are getting between 9 and 12 hours in their battery life tests. e.g. Tom’s Hardware at 9 hours, similar to what they saw on Intel Core Ultra Series 1: Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series) review: Increased performance at the expense of battery life | Tom's Hardware
I read / perceive reviews as a point-in-time measurement(s) of what’s been delivered for that particular physical unit, for that reviewer, rathar than what could be in a future state. Reviews, loosely indicate how polished a product is right out of the gate.
e.g. Reading / comparing the Notebookcheck reviews of the AI9 HX 370 vs the Ultra 7 155H, regarding the same display panel model, there’s almost a 3% difference in the sRGB coverage. Some indication of panel variation / tolerance.
Regarding the battery life, I think it might also be relevant to compare the FL13 AI 9 HX 370 with other HX370 from the market. Like, a pound for pound comparison to get a sense of how the FL13 compares to the rest of the field:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-AI-9-HX-370-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.836729.0.html
Take the following table for example. The Asus Zenbook S 16 has similar non-boost TDP of 28w, it’s battery is 78Wh, rated 640 in the Wifi v1.3 test. So 480 for the FL13 with 61Wh seems reasonable…given the same test by the same reviewer:
Even Tom’s Hardware review states “Poor battery life”…it might be an AMD thing, not so much on Framework. Tom’s Hardware also noted it’s worse than the Core Ultra, relatively (at product launch). (Regardless of whether it’s 480m or 9h:11m)
I would say, look at the FL13 AI 9 HX 370 across the board in the market of “What can be achieved with $xxxx dollars in 2025 for x86 / PC laptops”
What I find interesting (for the better) though is that the FL13 seem to be able to consume (and implying cooling) 55w average consumption (a large portion of that belongs to the CPU)…as there’s no obvious throttling (even if the charts only show up to 1.5 to 3 minutes). So cooling seems rather capable:
Man I hope the new cooler fits the 7000 series mainboard XD.
Battery live is hopefully a case of AMD fine wine (shipping things with half baked software and fixing later causing it to “age like wine”) and not some design flaw in the chip or the laptop itself.
How’s Tom’s hardware rating of 7040U’s battery life? Is it better or worse than Core Ultra?
At Tom’s, the FL13 7840u has around the same runtime as the FL13 13th gen 1370p.
Then, the FL13 Core Ultra 7 155H was tested with less runtime (attributing to the display?):
And this this FL13 AI 9 HX 370 has even less runtime than the FL13 Core Ultra 7 155H:
Well the 7840u also had a lot of software gremlins early on so that does kind of check out. Let’s hope that also buffs out over time with the new ones. Teaches me to buy bleeding edge stuff XD.
Yeah, I got burnt by bleeding edge with AMD, Intel, Linux, Framework, B&O, Technics, Sony…etc over the years.
Bleeding edge requires too much risk & suffering, with very little benefit.
I mean the performance was certainly there but pretty much everything else needed a ton of polish. Pretty much the opposite to buying a couple generation old somewhat damaged used enteprise stuff, performance may not be the greatest but pretty much all the gremlins have been ironed out XD.
Buying a 7900xtx near launch was also a stroke of genius on my end, it’s pretty good now but boy the early drivers had issues. Not really sure how they saw 100+w idle and were like “It’s fiiiine ship it” not to mention I had to rma my first one cause it would just randomly hard crash my system. Thought I was going crazy before I figured out it does that on entirely different systems too. The rma one was just fine after that.
Weirdly I have had fewer issues since I switched to a “bleeding-endge” rolling release distro than I had before using point release stuff. Plus if you are on a newer platform like the 7x40u there are still somewhat frequent improvements.
