I’m planning on pickup up the 340 variant of the Framework 16 later this year. Thought it would be good to have a thread to discuss this. It looks like the first batch has sold out.
A couple of questions from me if anyone can help?
CPU performance wise, it’s extremely similar to the previous Ryzen 5 7640U. The main difference is that they added an NPU for better on-chip AI workload performance. Though, I don’t know enough about that world to say how useful it actually is for folks tinkering with AI. For games that aren’t super CPU intensive, as long as you aren’t trying to push max frame rates on competitive or e-sports games, the CPU performance will likely be fine for gaming.
The integrated graphics are pared way down from the 7640U. When folks say it’s not great for gaming, there’s a good chance that’s what they are referring to, in comparison to other AMD chips with much more powerful integrated graphics. But if you are getting the 7700s dGPU, then you have that for gaming performance, and the weak iGPU shouldn’t matter. There are lots of benchmarks and such out there for the 7700s.
This will entirely depend on the game and how far you want to push the settings. I’m sure this is attainable on tons of games, but you might have to turn the graphics settings down on some of them.
I think the reason there isn’t a ton of talk about the AI 340 is because it’s basically a 7640u with an NPU and a weaker iGPU. It’s an okay chip, but it just didn’t generate a lot of buzz when it came out.