I’m upgrading my 11th gen intel mainboard, and am mostly concerned with battery life. I’m considering one of these three:
Intel Ultra 5 125H
Ryzen 5 7640U
Ryzen AI 5 340
I read previous closed topics that there were issues with the Ryzen AI battery life, but saw one post saying those were fixed in recent software updates.
Looks like I’ll have to get new RAM and a wifi card as well.
If you’ve used one or more of these, I’d love to hear how the battery holds up.
I have the Ryzen AI 5. Battery isn’t as amazing as I’d hoped but it’s still phenomenal compared to any other laptop I’ve had. Mine can last a couple days without charge usually and from 80% its lasted 6 hours of moderate use @ 40% brightness + Power Saving mode before I had to plug it in (and it still was at like 15% at the time I plugged it in).
For context I have the 2.8K display @120hz + Fedora KDE. I don’t think I could get the same amount of battery life on most other laptops. I will also say that I JUST got this so the battery is very healthy.
Also a cool perk of the AI board is the pretty beefy integrated graphics so maybe that’ll persuade you a bit more. That’s certainly what got me. And the NPU is a cool edition but effectively useless as of right now, I haven’t seen a single app use it.
Disclaimer: I don’t have a Framework laptop yet, but have done a bit of research on the topic.
From what I’ve been reading, the question of battery life vs. processor depends on your use case, and the tradeoffs you’re willing to make. Being on Windows makes your problem a bit more straightforward to solve. Here are my thoughts based on what I’ve read so far:
When choosing your CPU for battery life, here are the factors I think you should consider:
If you plan on using your laptop for high-CPU tasks while on battery, and you want it to be battery-efficient, pick an AMD processor. To date, they are supposed to be the most efficient under load.
Might as well go for Ryzen AI, purely for the updated parts and length of support.
Intel mobile processors tend to be a lot more efficient under light load. If you plan to mostly consume media or view websites while on battery, pick the Intel processor.
If you’re okay with a performance compromise, pick the Intel processor and disable Turbo Boost. You’ll benefit from the idle power savings, and will still have access to the performance cores for extra speed, but with limits.
If it were up to me, I would go with the Intel processor and disable Turbo Boost. I think you get more benefit from multiple cores than a super fast clock speed, unless you’re doing some really heavy programming or similar.
However… I’m a Linux user, and the Linux driver situation is always a bit more touchy. 