I currently have a Framework 13 with 11th gen i7-1185G7 and I have been wondering if switching to a newer but less powerful mainboard could offer better battery life. For example, how does the battery life with the Ultra 5 125H compare to the Ultra 7 155H, or how does the battery life using Intel Core compare to AMD Ryzen.
I am mostly using this laptop for basic web browsing and remote desktop to other devices, so I am not concerned about performance and I would like to optimize for battery life
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The latest boards are more efficient in general, even the powerful ones.
I switched from that board to an AMD (7840U) and saw a pretty significant reduction in power usage (after correctly configuring power-profiles-daemon). I got it down to a consistent 4-6W before I switched to the new screen which takes an extra watt or two, in my experience. Now I tend to average 6-8W depending on what I’m doing.
The main downside is that the AMD video decoding drivers don’t do a great job on power saving, so I wouldn’t recommend the switch if you need long battery life for watching youtube videos (11-14W total depending on what you’re doing).
The simplest upgrade is to just get the bigger battery.
remote desktop
Depending on whether or not that involves video decoding on the GPU, that could be a poor match given the current state of the AMD video drivers.