Hate to be a contrarian but is there any potential of a lower power mainboard option? I ran on an N100 for years and it was more than sufficient for most things and the power savings were really noticeable. I would love an N150 mainboard.
Alternatively, is undervolting the proccesor a viable stand-in?
This should be low power enough.
Undervolting is dead due to Plundervolt AFAIK. You aren’t that much of a contrarian tho. Plenty of folks wondered at the CPU choice for different reasons.
This thing doesn’t have proper power management, it appears to be consuming 15W constantly
It’s also a dev board and entirely unsuitable for normal use. Which is not something you could say about the n150.
That one is just weak, the riscv boards actually use a surprisingly high ammount of power.
I am also a fan of the intel N series, it’s on of the better products intel currently makes and kind of dominates it’s niche. For the 12 they do seem to be using a fancier chip in a similar roll, they aren’t using the thunderbolt, they aren’t suing the second memory channel…
Then again the whole chasis is probably expensive enough that the relative price difference for using an n series would have been relatively low and would have put it in a lower bracket. They probably got a pretty good deal on the 12th gen I-series they are using too so the actual cost difference may be even lower.
N100/150 is cheaper but have soldered RAM that runs at lower than 5000MT/s (I forgot the exact value. They have lower idle power consumption. For high efficiency AMD 7040 underclocked to 15W consumes less power per work than N100/150 but has slightly higher power consumption when doing nothing. The AMD 7040 needs two RAM slots to get its full potential. The N100 N150 use soldered RAM regardless, at least you have space for an 2280 SSD.
The n series can use socketed ram, it’s memory controller supports ddr4/5 and lpddr4/5.
Min idle is in the same ballpark as the 13th gen I series used in the fw12
That isn’t really the point here, if you want to go down that route the n100 has hw decoders that use a lot less power decoding the same things the 7x40u does.
The n series only has one but not really sure what your point is here.
It CAN use soldered ram, it doesn’t have to.
Sorry I mistaken. Thanks for clarifying
Then N100/150 is definitely a valid choice
For media playback the things are absolute beasts, they got the baller intel hw decoder and enough cores to feed it but not a lot more than that, to be fair the 13th gen I series in the 12 also have that hw decoder they just got a bit more other stuff too.
Yep, I tested the N150 has much lower CPU power when playing identical video. Since the N150 supports single channel DDR4(3200MT/s), DDR5/LPDDR5(4800MT/s), it can achieve its full potential on FL12, with single channel DDR5 SODIMM RAM.
I think I found the problem: connectivity.
Among those N150 Laptops none of them has 4 USB-C ports. There are some configurations.
2 USB-C: PD charging, 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort Alt Mode
2 USB-C: PD charging, 3.2 Gen 1, DPAlt + 1 USB-C: USB 2.0
1 USB-C + multiple USB-A
There are no 4 USB-C nor 2 USB-C + 2 USB-A
even if there weren’t enough usb ports that isn’t impossible to overcome, it has pcie lanes and hubs are a thing (framework uses one for some of the ports in the 16 already).
However there are, just because noone chose to make all the usb port usb-c doesn’t mean it is not possible. The 4 pd port thing will of course require the normal framework ec bridge thing with 2 separate pd controllers but it is about as weird as it is on all the other framework platforms and for data usb3.2 gen2 doesn’t care if it is running over usb-a or usb-c (20Gbit 2x2 does but the n series don’t have that natively anyway).
For a hypothetical framework n150 we’d probably get 2 usb-c with pd, dp1.4 and 10Gbit usb and 2 usb-c with pd and 10Gbit usb.
