can a fw13 mainboard squeeze into a fw12 chassis?
I’m happy to get my hands dirty and take a hit on battery life if it means I get a small, durable, upgradeable, high performance laptop in an all black colour way (and I’m probably not the only one)
just going off the pictures and specifications that are published on Frameworks website, but…
doesn’t fit, the FW13 board is wider, and the FW12 is packed awfully tight, I don’t have dimensions for the mainboards themselves, but FW13 is 9.63mm wider than FW12(296.63mm vs 287mm)
maybe it could be done if you gave up the expansion cards on one side, and you could probably still use those ports without the cards, but the hinges, the audio board and the power board are all also in that space on the FW 12, and it doesn’t seem to be arranged the same way as the FW13, so you’d probably have to find space for connections, and possibly adaptors besides.
if you’re absolutely determined, it might be possible, but I’d expect to outright destroy a dozen of EACH trying to make it work, and it’d almost certainly require custom printed or fabbed parts even then…the other way around might be doable though.
edit
oh, as for the ‘all black’ there are like four different websites that sell wraps for FW13, and they ALL have options for ‘all black’ and should, in theory at least, protect it from scratches at least as well.
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Framework Laptop 13 mainboards are not compatible with Framework Laptop 12 chassis.
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thanks for confirming!
any chance there is a high performance fw12 in the pipeline, something with 12 cores perhaps?
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appreciate the breakdown. looks like you’re correct, as @Destroya just confirmed it is not compatible.
I had a similar idea to remove the expansion cards on one side. it does look pretty different in there with the wifi card moved and the pogo pin connector. I guess there is only one way to find out
also thanks for the recommendation. I’ll be grabbing a wrap in the mean time
we do not share out future plans until we are ready 
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oh, I totally forget about the pogo connectors, that would pretty much mean you’d have to also make a custom keyboard, or find an adaptor that may or may not exist(I sincerely have no idea, and don’t care enough to go down yet another rabbit hole to find out 
)
also, you’re welcome, that particular bit of knowledge comes from another rabbit hole that ate most of my day
I plan to get one myself after I talk to my sister and find out if she wants one too
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which is almost half as frustrating as it would be if you were telling us all the awesome things you want to do, and then finding out that you can’t do those awesome things, or that we have to wait five times longer than we thought we would because it’s more complicated than it should be
there would be riots…I’d start them myself XD
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Just as a point of reference, do y’all reckon the FW12 would be able to play Fortnite? I’m not familiar with the performance of the listed specs.
This might help, here’s a video of someone playing Fortnite on the i3 1315U, timestamp at 13:30 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq_chNFCtOI&t=810s
For the i5 I would imagine you just pretend it’s this but with 10-20% more power
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Now there is another curve ball that we need to deal with .
The graphic is going to be running under intel UDH not as intel iris XE ( yes it does advertised as UDH)
cause intel XE required dual channel in running and framework 12 only got one sodimm slot.
There is a bit of difference in term of performance with that
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PS since I thrown a monkey ranch onto this . I did found a benchmark video on UDH, it is based on a 1215u. So best case we get a bit more performance. Worse case, on par performance . Honestly, my take, might want to reduce the resolution mate .
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720p gaming here I come! 
EDIT: Oh boy, after digging into this even further, 720p gaming might not even be viable
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Monkey wrench monkey ranch . Ha ha ha can’t believed I typed that .
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for gaming performance, the biggest thing the FW12 is lacking is the GPU, the CPU itself actually outperforms my old gaming laptop(HP oman I paid ~$2k for at the end of '19) by a decent margin, even if you got the i3 like I did.
(ignoring the RTX2070 my oman has )
without a dedicated GPU, or one of the new processors that can do a decent job of faking having a dedicated GPU (like the ultra 125 I have in my FW13, or either of the AMD series the FW13 has) it’s not going to be amazing even at 720p, but it shouldn’t be completely hopeless by a long shot
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I spun up another thread about the single-channel memory issue linked below. I thought I would be fine with Intel UHD Graphics at first, but now realizing that most benchmarks for it online all involve dual-channel memory… I’m not too sure how tolerable the iGPU performance actually is anymore
Would love a mini version of one of those Strix Halo chips that bundle RAM/VRAM/CPU/GPU altogether on a FW12 board someday, but until then I guess I’ll game on another machine
Thread link: iGPU Performance on FW12's Single-Channel RAM?
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