Classic SODDIM mainboard recommendation

Framework Laptop 13
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1

Hi there,

I am looking to buy a framework 13 after the last one got stolen (lucky thief)

I wanted to know what main board you recommend for good battery life.

The new ultra 3 series seems super enticing but is uses LPDRAM and since I have SODIM kits on hand (lucky me) it feels bad to buy more ram at a not so great price.

Thanks for the answers and feel free to ask me more questions

2

Are the sticks you have on hand DDR4 or DDR5 SODIMMs?

3

DDR5 so compatible with all your boards iirc

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Older boards, including intel 11th to 13th gen used DDR4, which is why I asked.

5

FYI, D.H is not employed by Framework Computer. Most of the people you’ll get replies from here are not. This includes myself.

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I can’t give a hard recommendation, but I can suggest a few criteria to consider based on my experience…

  1. Select a baseline for what performance tier you need/want. Interestingly, the chipsets FW offers break into 3 pretty clean bands.
  2. Determine what platforms fit your use requirements. (Each band has both Intel and AMD options, so I put perf as step 1.)
    • IO: Do you need TB? FW’s USB 4 on the AMD boards is pretty good, but the 4 TB ports on Intel is more than you get on the AMD boards.
    • Battery life: You mentioned this as your primary factor. I get the impression that most of the FW 13 SODIMM boards are pretty similar in general, but there are reportedly some differences based on use case. I hear the Intel ones are more efficient at low-intensity workloads like office use tasks, but the AMD boards do better for more intensive use like gaming or compilation or such. The idle numbers for all are supposedly pretty comparable. Usually the newer the chip, the more efficient it is, but this isn’t necessarily true for the ones here.
    • Suport: AFAIK, OS, firmware, and hardware support for all the boards FW currently sells is pretty good, excepting some miscellaneous minor bugs in various stages of being fixed.
    • etc.
  3. Adjust selection up or down by how much you can or want to spend. Some boards are better deals than the others, so depending on how strict your requirements are, you may be able to take advantage of the uneven price scaling relative to your most important criteria.

I put together a spreadsheet a while back with the price and performance numbers for all the FW 13 boards, so here it is updated with the latest data in case it’s of benefit to you (remove the .stl).

fw-13-mainboard-comparison.ods.stl (5.5 KB)

fw-13-mainboards-sort-year
fw-13-mainboards-sort-year1920×872 504 KB

fw-13-mainboards-sort-mc
fw-13-mainboards-sort-mc1920×872 510 KB

fw-13-mainboards-sort-mcv
fw-13-mainboards-sort-mcv1920×872 511 KB

1 Like
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Does charts are pretty nice, does their exist similar charts for GPU bench scores?

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I haven’t made any. The spreadsheet was initially intended for comparing the value of the mainboards for use as a little headless server, so GPU wasn’t really a consideration for my use. I also don’t do much GPU-based work in general. I have thought about adding it, but I don’t know what numbers or benchmark would be most relevant to compare. PassMark’s GPU site (videocardbenchmark.net) has numbers for their G2D and G3D benchmarks that are easy to add and probably somewhat representative of a general performance curve for a wide range of uses. There’s also UNIGINE or 3DMark or others that are specifically designed to test 3D rendering and game engine performance. But performance varies by use case a lot too – some software or games run much better on some hardware than others.

If anyone has input on a good choice, I’m open to suggestions. If not, I’ll probably just use PassMark’s numbers again. If there’s interest, it could be nice to modify it to put the board pricing on a reference sheet so it’s easy to extend for other comparison criteria by creating sheets for each data type from a template.

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I am afraid I wouldn’t know either. The only app I have ever not been able to run is Resolve.

As a five year old iGPU covers my current need I would be the wrong person to say.

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Thanks for that detailed answer.

I think I’ll go ultra 1, better efficiency in gaming/compiling is good but those are activities I generally do while plugged.

So the benefits of AMD will not be useful in my case

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the amd boards support avx512, that can be a dramatic improvement in apps that are built for it. if you mostly run apps you build yourself it might be worth considering the more morden isa with amd.

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Even a fair bit of software that you don’t compile yourself. Media render and encode, cryptography, compression, sorting algorithms, etc. often have runtime detection for feature support and will run codepaths with the faster instructions on processors that support such features.