I currently have an 11th gen i5 board which has been a pretty horrible experience. It’s extremely picky about power requirements (won’t work with my steam deck charger or my usb c monitor’s power) and seemingly seems to die for days then somehow revives again. The power issues are true for all the 11th gen fw13s in my office too.
I’m thinking of getting a 7640u instead. Has anyone used it out of the laptop for an extended period? How has the experience been?
I have been given a work laptop with a 7640u and it’s significantly less finnicky. It works with my monitor, most chargers, lasts at least 2.5x longer on battery. Does this translate over to out of chassis usage too? I do not want to mess with my work laptop and test it myself.
I like the idea that you can use the main-board outside the laptop after an upgrade but getting it to use as a mini-pc in the first place doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me. There are tons of dedicated mini-pcs available that are cheaper and much better suited to the standalone task.
Steamdeck charger is ok for charging but a bit weak to standalone power it. Modern chips are quite spiky in their power consumption, that isn’t really an issue if you have a battery but if you have a marginal charger you’ll either have to kneecap it to stay within the envelope at all times or crash.
The amd framework only recently started working with the steam-deck charger (and a most <65W and a few select >=65W chargers, the rest worked before that) at all (bug in the embedded controller), not sure about standalone mode.
I’m going to mostly stick to running it headless, no displays and stuff. I understand that a Steam Deck 45w charger is not ideal but the 11th gen boards refuse to even turn on with it.
Yeah I know getting it purely for using out of chassis is not the best investment, but I have other DIY plans for it so I want to have it on hand.
During post it usually goes full throttle, if it doesn’t get enough power for that you won’t get any further.
For standalone operation you’ll really want something 65W+ and for stationary installation you don’t even need a fancy compact one so it’s not a huge investment to get one of those.
Fair enough but I assume it can still handle it.
The 11th gens have other issues that I forgot to mention as well. For example… if I plug in my usb-c monitor and a large 80w power together it refuses to start up because it can’t see the bigger power source. I have to unplug the monitor during startup then plug it in later.
Evidently not really.
Sure my amd framework can stay afloat on a 18w charger but I really would not want to run it standalone on that.
2 Likes