Will there eventually be backlit for others then just us English
Really want backlit but use danish letters a lot
Could do mapping with zmk but would like to see it in others then us
5 Likes
That was my only real issue with the 13th gen.
Battery and screen are the same, so only major power improvement is cpu efficiency.
2 Likes
I was thinking recently that an upgrade for the 12 was due. While I never wanted a backlit keyboard I appreciate a lot of others did. The new mainboard looks good, but I probably won’t upgrade for now, as performance/ battery life is not currently a pain point for me.
I’m sad that a better display isn’t in this round of upgrades (and especially with the new mainboard, would make it ideal for light creative tasks and workflows). Better speakers would be great too.
Edit to add: I’ve been running Fedora Kde after trying a couple of other distros and it has worked the best out of all I tried (and almost flawlessly), so kudos for that choice of a pre-installed distro.
Also I’ve now seen the mention of display and speakers on the announcement video - good to know they’re being worked on 
Is the new Intel® BE213 Wi-Fi 7 module included in the Core Series 3 mainboard product? It is mentioned under “Connectivity”, but not under “Included items”.
Wow, just wow. I’m happy to be a Framework Laptop 12 owner. I’m definitely buying the fingerprint reader button but new motherboards look very tempting.
I’m curious about few things:
- current, intel 13th gen doesn’t run at full performance unless you plug in 55W+ charger - is it also the case with these new motherboards?
- is the material on new touchpads different or the same as previously?
- when it comes to prebuilts - will it be Fedora Workstation KDE or the immutable version Kinoite? Will the codecs and
intel-media-driverbe preinstalled? In my opinion that’s quite important since without that you’d cancel out power savings by not having hardware video decode work out of the box.
1 Like
Hey, people who already pre-ordered Framework Laptop 12 Core Series 3, may I ask you to create “FW12 Core Series 3 Batch N Guild” threads in the Framework Laptop 12 category?
Not at this time, but curious to know what languages you’d be interested in
Wi-Fi card is purchased separately, but Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX211 works with the new Mainboards as well
1 Like
- I’ve brought this to the team to investigate, I may follow up and ask you to create a ticket if we need additional info
- Touchpad material is the same, but now features STM32
- Looking into an answer for you here, but the Fedora Workstation is GNOME, it’s standard Fedora KDE not Kinoite
There should be some performance improvements too. Remember the 13th Gen out there all use dual channel memory. In Framework 12, it only has single channel.
CPU performance is impacted by 15-20%. The GPU is 30% faster in high frame rate(not demanding) games and 40-50% in more demanding, low frame rate games.
1 Like
It shouldn’t be bandwidth starved at all, at least for GPU. 13 Pro is fine with 2x7466 and 12 Xe3 cores. This chip has anywhere from 1/12 to 1/6 the compute. Meaning even assuming 1/6, 1xDDR4-3200 is more bandwidth per compute than 13 Pro.
Of course, the CPU might be slower too but shouldn’t be a huge downgrade.
Thank you for reply, I’ll clarify the first point and what I meant about codecs.
There was once a post on reddit where someone linked to FW12 firmware code (I’ve dug out link from my browser history: EmbeddedController/zephyr/program/framework/sunflower/src/cpu_power.c at fwk-sunflower-26784 · FrameworkComputer/EmbeddedController · GitHub ) which basically boils down to: normally the CPU runs at 15W sustained max but when you plug in a at least 55W charger and battery is charged to at least 30% it will run 20W sustained and other short-term power limits are increased. I’ve tested it myself on i5 variant and it actually gives a quite noticeable performance boost which is useful for games or more demanding work. I’m wondering whether new motherboards will have the same behavior.
Sorry about the confusion though, I’ve mixed up Fedora editions a little - I’ve had standard Fedora KDE or Kinoite in mind.
So about the codecs, As far as I remember Fedora doesn’t have an easy way to enable RPMFusion and install necessary packages to enable all HW video decoders like, for example, Ubuntu does. So by default even when the gpu supports h264, h265, vp9 and av1 the only hw accelerated format is av1 from what I remember. It’s not hard to do this but I think it’s worth pre-installing those because many users might be not aware of that and end up being unhappy with battery life during video playback. I might be wrong though, it might be available in the installer of current Fedora 44 or it was for a long time but I don’t remember.
1 Like
Of course 2 days after I ordered the 12 lol! I sent a support ticket because now I’m just torn between cheaper or newer.
1 Like
Ordered a core 5 mainboard, I wanted more efficiency/battery life so this really was what I’ve been waiting for. The fingerprint sounds cool too!
Can we get a coolermaster or other main board case for the framework 12 so that I can use my old mainboard as a minipc 
3 Likes
The raptor cove P core on 13th gen requires nearly 20W to turbo fully even on single core.
The cores in Panther and Wildcat can turbo with few W less. the benefit should be on games with LPE cores as they are more power efficient. Intel themselves talked about using E cores for gaming.
The lower idle power will also lower total system power when active too.
Framework claims 57% more Web browsing battery life, 70% more video playback and 7.6 days standby over the predecessor. The battery life claims are only 9% away from 13 Pro at the same capacity despite not using LPCAMM2. Also 7.6 day standby is better than 13 Pro despite much smaller battery.
However, the older generation of FL12 supports S3 sleep, which makes it sleep longer than this generation
2 Likes
So the fw12 touchpad/trackpad is still the prior-pro model? Where it is actual depressions rather than haptic feedback? I’d really like to see the pro’s touchpad roll out to all the devices.
I’ve got the non-pro 13" and for me the touchpad is too awful to use, so I have to use an external mouse; which somewhat defeats the portability.
1 Like
+1 for German, but I guess you already know your sales numbers.
I understand that you need to keep the number of parts manageable, but why not sell out the classic keyboards and only sell backlit ones with the same layouts?
I almost bit the bullet last night when Batch 1 was still up…but I’m mostly intrigued by better casual gaming performance, and I know too little about Intel GPUs to predict if it’s more of a 10% or 50% gain. Hopefully there will be reviews & benchmarks before the year ends.
3 Likes
Love seeing the improvements.
Looking forward to seeing other Framework devices to also come with Fedora pre-installed. Or maybe even Ultramarine, which makes setup that much easier and adds to a better out-of-the-box experience.
For those questioning the performance reasons for upgrading, I looked it up. You will see a 10-20% improvement across the board, with massive improvements in AI workloads as the new mainboard has a NPU which the 13th gen does not. In addition you get thunderbolt connectivity.
In short, if you can afford the new mainboard, it looks like it is totally worth the upgrade.
Don’t forget that you are looking at pretty significant efficiency (battery life) improvements as well.
While the overall thread count has gone down the efficiency gains have more than made up for them.
@catastrophic you are crushing answering questions in this thread, so I’ll throw one more your way: Will Framework be offering a FW 12 13th gen upgrade package that includes a mainboard (of your choice), new keyboard cover, and new fingerprint based power button? I will be ordering this as soon as possible.
3 Likes