Mine arrived last Tuesday morning and I have not been able to spend a lot of quality time with it yet.
DIY Build went smoothly, was not in a rush so savored the ability to work with the well designed hardware. Was mindful of the tiny(!) 2280 screw. The included tool is mildly magnetic, which is a great touch and helpful with the few screws that are not captive.
Memory training on 64G went quickly enough, because I was forewarned, thanks to this community. Otherwise it would have been a stressful 30 seconds lol.
I combed through the BIOS, turning off secure boot and on Linux audio.
Booted to USB stick to run a full pass of memtest86, perfect!
Loaded Mint Edge live, and when through the install. Quick and easy!
Still to do:
Figure out how to partition and implement separate /root and /home, larger Swap for hibernation.
Move my Thunderbird mail config over from previous laptop.
Figure out how to get text on web pages to display in a much larger font… The screen is beautiful but my old eyes get stressed easily.
My input Deck is fine. Very slight difference between touchpad and spacers which does not bother me a bit. I consider it a badge of honor for having a first generation device specifically designed to be user maintained. If it gets more pronounced, I will bend the touchpad to mitigate. If Framework or a community modification comes along with full width input decks (hopefully left, center, right!) I will surely be on the pre-order for one or more.
I ordered a 250G expansion module so I can conveniently load Ubuntu or Fedora without touching my Mint install. And will be watching for an affordable 2Tb 2230 drive for the same reason.
Update 2:
Two hours later, I got an error upon finally booting (input module connector board not detected). I was about to give up on Framework altogether, but I took the whole thing apart another 3 times wiggling the connector in different ways… and then it finally started. Only to discover that amid all this I had forgotten to prepare my copy of Windows… and my old bloody laptop does not have the required 8 GB space on C to start the Windows 11 setup tool (which is not actually necessary when using a USB drive, but it turns out there is a flaw in the software that requires this before you can get to the USB step).
Currently wishing I had not gotten the DIY version. I’ve managed to fix a bunch of things so far, but the sense of accomplishment does not exceed the level of stress x amount of time.
Update 3:
Oh I somehow missed the part where you need to get the ISO + Rufus. Re-doing Windows again now.
Update 4:
It works! For now. The whole experience has left me a little bit doubtful. Fingers crossed it is smooth sailing from here on out and all I need to worry about is a cool name for the device and the drives.
Also got this message the first time after assembling my DIY FW16. To resolve, I re-connected the midplate cable -that’s the attach “1” on midplate- by putting a vertical downwards pressure near the red mark.
Carefully looking onto it, I noticed it consists in a connector that needs to be plugged by pressing on it.
I admit my experience with my b17 unit was far better than yours. Hope you will now enjoy your laptop
Okay time for some first impressions : ) I am planning to write a more detailed review once I have used the laptop a little longer, but there’s some things I am curious if people have thoughts on.
Laptop was actually bigger and heavier than I expected. Not an improvement on my old laptop! But I mostly use it at a desk anyway so that’s not a big deal. I would have liked something just slightly smaller and lighter but it’s not a dealbreaker.
Screen and keyboard are both totally fine, absolutely no complaints. Don’t agree with any negative reviews on these. Sure, the keyboard is slightly less nice than on my old laptop, but I had specifically selected that for good typing when I was writing up my PhD, I mind a lot less now. Quite enjoying setting the RGB keyboard to pink and purple at the moment.
Webcam and audio both much better than on my old laptop. Hadn’t even really taken this into consideration before buying, but it’s a nice bonus.
Very pleased with all my memory and disk space, really happy that this is so customisable with Framework. This was the number one selling point for me.
Have successfully edited some photos, another reason I really needed a new laptop (I’m in the graphic designer category of Framework enthusiasts, not gaming).
After all my struggles with the mainboard, I am actually quite happy about the sustainability and component replacement side of things too. I was about to give up on the entire project because for me it made the laptop seem so fragile, and I actually found it so difficult… But having successfully opened and closed the whole thing about 5 times now, and seen every component up close, I feel so much more confident about this device than any other laptop I have ever owned. We’ll see if it lasts. Maybe the screw in the mainboard will pop off again next week and I will still throw it out the window. But for now, it’s great that it’s actually possible to fix things myself and to learn how to fix things myself.
One complaint so far: the fan noise is insane. Have I done something wrong, is something set to the wrong setting? The laptop makes no noise in regular work-from-home mode, but I downloaded a game from Steam to test, well, how it runs games. Nothing complicated, just a city builder type thing… and as soon as I start it and the laptop switches to dGPU the noise is super loud. Like if I go to another room to make a cup of tea, I can still hear it. I sort of get used to it when I am playing, and the game sound is on - so it is not the end of the world… but still, this can’t be right, can it???
I’ve had mine running (trying) Star Citizen for a few hours, the fan was never excessively loud by my standards, and the CPU and GPU were both running near 100% (all cores).
Regarding the fan noise. I think the air intake is from the bottom of the laptop, and then blows out the sides. So if you put the laptop on a hard surface it is probably good, but if you place it on a soft surface like sofa or lap, it might not have enough air flow.
The fastest I have got the fans to spin at is 4000rpm while compiling a kernel. You can view the speed in Linux with:
ectool pwmgetfanrpm all
I don’t think 4000 is full speed.
It all depends on what you are used to and expecting. The fan noise on the FW16 is very noticeable, but not louder than the typical gaming laptop these days. I compare it to a hairdryer on a low setting. Look online for information about the noise of gaming laptops, you’ll see (well, hear) that this level of fan noise is quite typical. Some are quieter, but that is typically touted as a “feature” and can come at the cost of performance.
Ugh, so now my touchpad has stopped working (I2C HID error, but all drivers up to date and enabling and disabling does nothing). Also I am pretty sure one of my USB ports is not working (also despite moving it to different slots and updating drivers), but I haven’t even had time to investigate that yet.
Definitely agree with this. I was disappointed that it doesn’t fit in the pouch of my bag that is for 16" laptops… Just a liiiittle too wide. Fortunately, I can put it in the compartment outside of the pouch, and it’s still protected and secure, as long as the bag is opened carefully.
I might be having a problem with one of mine as well but I haven’t been bothered enough to chase it down yet.
how long has it been?
