FW16 for music/production?

Framework Laptop 16
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I’m waiting on the FW16 to upgrade my 2018 2-in-1 that I’ve used for everything from streaming to stage performance, and it’s been almost flawless despite the 8th gen i7 starting to show its age. Is anyone else using a FW currently for performance or production work?

I’m especially interested in the module swapping, but waiting on the 16 for the numpad and bigger screen. Changing my setup from one gig to the next is essential, so if the FW16 is everything I think it will be, this could be my last stage laptop (until they release a FW18 haha).

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The 11th gen i5 runs Ableton + a software audio interface flawlessly, so I’m fairly confident that anything more recent will be perfect performance wise. Hardware wise, I have a few obscenely ambitious USB midi controller ideas for the input modules and expansion bay, we’ll see if I can make anything work when I decide to grab a 16 as a studio laptop.

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YES that is EXACTLY what I’m talking about! I perform with Serato, but I’m hoping to be able to run an OBS instance out to a live screen for visuals and still have enough horsepower for the new stems algorithm. Hell … three years ago I would have been happy just to have upgradeable RAM. I still can’t believe this thing is real haha.

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I’m so jazzed about the possibilities here. Not only for things like nifty input devices and control surfaces, but thinking about that expansion bay with raid NVME’s to load sample libraries and sessions lightning fast, or a Dante AV solution with a few RJ45 ports on the back? So much cool stuff that can happen with the 16 as a platform.

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“Jazzed” … I see what you did there :slight_smile:

I started using a Reloop Stand Hub with my setup a couple years ago, and it was a total game-changer. It’s a laptop stand with a 60w PD USB-C hub built into one of the legs, so now I can run all the power I need to the four USB-A ports on the stand, and still free up all the ports on the computer itself (save for that one C-port). The way FW designed these, my brain is spinning with the ideas of all the hardware I can run on stage. That FW16 can’t come soon enough.

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Hi @Jeff_S how is your experience so far with music production? Any issues at all? I am considering moving away from MacBook Pro M1, when 120Hz screen is available for shipping.

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Not sure if this is relevant, but I can report that Sibelius works just fine. I haven’t opened Reaper on this machine yet, but I’ll report back if I have any issues. I just finished installing OBS last week, but I haven’t used it for much aside fro preliminary testing. There’s another thread regarding some OBS issues you might want to look at if that applies to you.

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Hi! Revisiting this post, are you using the headphone expansion card or an external DAC? I’m exploring options for consolidating my hardware setup and I’m increasingly dissatisfied with the 13’s onboard dac compared to my interface.

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Isn’t the expansion card already a DAC?

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sorry, should have clarified, headphone expansion card or other external DAC (like a USB audio interface etc).

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Chiming in here because I have a rather unique setup.

tl;dr: 30-40% slower on Framework 16 with Ryzen 7 7840HS than daily driver with i7-7700HQ for a specific workload which is important for my music production setup. The Framework 16 is a nice laptop, though. YMMV. Also, I haven’t 100% ruled out hardware issues, but I’m working on it.

My music production makes heavy use of real-time software synthesis, and for various reasons I have to set the latency on my device configuration all the way up to 250ms in order for live playback to work without getting laggy/choppy.

My current daily driver for this setup is a “gaming laptop” with an Intel i7-7700HQ.

I ordered a Framework 16 with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS and a dedicated GPU.

I noticed my music files were lagging on the Framework 16 during live playback. I ruled out obvious CPU deficiency, bad RAM, overheating, expansion cards, and a couple other things.

I then ran a test where, on each laptop, I had my DAW export a music file with a few minutes of a repeated sequence which ran fine on my daily driver, but pushed the Framework 16 slightly past its limit during live playback.

The music export test was 30-40% slower on the Framework 16 compared to my daily driver.

I also tried restricting the program’s execution to a single physical core, and setting the Framework 16 to favor performance over battery, but these didn’t affect the results much.

Maybe there’s more to the Ryzen 9 7940HS (the Framework 16’s higher-end offering) than the benchmarks suggest, but I’m not in a position to test that.

There are things I do like about the Framework 16, though, relative to the gaming laptop. The headphone jack expansion card seems to output better quality audio, and the fans are much less noisy. And… oh yea… the laptop works (mostly).

I can’t do a 1:1 comparison with a laptop brand or form factor because specs can vary widely. YMMV.

Also, I haven’t 100% ruled out hardware issues, but I’m working on it.

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It turns out there was an IPC-related bottleneck in the CPU for my specific workload: 2x reduction in IPC on the Ryzen 7 compared to the Intel i7, canceling out the improvements in clock speed. Likely not solvable with an RMA. As far as I can tell, it’s not a memory latency issue. Single core performance appears to be the bottleneck.

There were also some uneven CPU thermals as well which accounted for up to 10% of a performance loss in my case, but this is reported to have been fixed in newer models. Since thermal throttling is related to clock speed, not IPC, I concluded the thermal fixes would not be enough.

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When you compared IPC, what test did you do? What were the actual scores?

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How’s folks DPC latency? It’s quite spikey on mine, yellow / red on dpclat and only gets slightly better once I disable the wifi card.