My framework is almost 2 years old, and I believe it is time for a mainboard upgrade.
I have had little luck identifying, with confidence, which new mainboard will be compatible with my current system.
Does anyone have direction on how to select a good match?
2 Years old is most likely an 11th Gen Intel, or possibly 12th Gen.
Upgrades would be a 13th Gen Intel or the AMD boards.
AMD may not reuse your RAM, so there would be an additional purchase.
Is there anything you see as a shortcoming in your current device?
Are you going to reuse your current motherboard and parts? perhaps in a Cooler Master Case?
Lots of options.
2 years old sounds pretty new to me. What’s your reason for wanting to upgrade? Is there a specific task your perform regularly that it is not able to perform satisfactorily?
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my primary concern is that I am consistently above 30% cpu usage - measured via task manager - and can both hear the fans overuse and feel excessive heat coming from the laptop
I rarely encounter non-cpu related issues, and have not seen my ram above 60% - again via task manager - even during heavy use.
I have recently began delving into coding, and the cpu does not appear to be able to keep up when running vsCode and Chrome at the same time, hence the reason for the upgrade.
from the order “Intel i5-1135G7”
I think this means I am looking at an 11-gen
I had not considered reusing the board, and was not aware of the Cooler Master… I will have to look into how that works!
I would love it if I could repurpose the old mainboard into a portable external GPU, but even reusing it as a spare computer would be good…
What I recommend is to reuse the mainboard in the cooler master case, keeping your chassis and battery, and getting a Ryzen board. The Ryzen boards have better battery life and graphics than Intel boards as well as better temps.
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Every board released to date will be compatible with your machine. You can likely reuse everything you’ve got if you select an Intel board. As others have mentioned, going AMD would mean that you’d also need at least new RAM.
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That is good to know!
I’m surprised to hear that the CPU is consistently above 30%. I would expect that when compiling or doing specific compute-intensive tasks, but I would not expect that when just coding/testing. Have you confirmed that it’s vsCode and/or Chrome using the CPU and not some unrelated background task? For example, search indexer and virus scans have been running in the background on my system lately, causing it to use more resources than I would typically expect. Additionally, if Chrome is using a lot of CPU, then it might be an indicator that the code you’re running is resource intensive, which is a bad sign if you’re doing something like building a web app. I mention this because I’ve also had issues with some of my own code causing my CPU to boost, which caused my fans to kick in… but it was my code that was the problem and hearing the fan was the first thing that alerted me to the issue in my code!
Back to your question:
There was another thread recently about which Intel board to upgrade to; if you’re debating between Intel 12th and 13th gen, I’d suggest finding that thread. I think it might have discussed i5 vs i7 as well. If $ is a concern and you don’t need the multi-core performance, i5 might be enough for you, for example.
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I have confirmed that it is consistently Chrome that is using my resources, frequently 15-20%, but it only occurs when running concurrently with vsCode (which tends to sit around 5% when not running code) and does not seem to correlate with when my code is running vs when viewing reference sites while working on my code.
I am not at the point yet where I know how to differentiate good code from bad, but hope to be there soon and thank you for the encouragement!
To demystify my comment a bit; it was something simple like being stuck in a loop without an exit condition or parsing a really long array that I only ever expected to be relatively short.
FYI: You might want to check out Chromes Task Manager if you haven’t already: Google Chrome's Task Manager - How to use it
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