Hello! I have an 11th gen framework with these specs:
Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX210 No vPro®
DDR4-3200 - 16GB (2 x 8GB)
11th gen Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7
I want to upgrade to an AMD Ryzen™ 5 7640U, and as far as I understand I will need to also NEED to upgrade the ram, so I will get the upgrade kit with:
16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR5-5600
AMD Ryzen™ 5 7640U (Mainboard)
(pottentially) AMD RZ616 Wi-Fi 6E
Is there something else I need? My os is Linux, so I am not worried about windows keys. Also do I need the new network card? Is it really a big upgrade/ necessary or just a nice to have?
Please let me know of anything I should know.
It’s not an upgrade. It is a sidegrade (some consider it a downgrade) that may perform better in some situations but worse in others.
Intel recommends that Intel WiFi cards be used with Intel CPUs and AMD recommends that AMD CPUs be used with AMD WiFi cards, however there is no technical reason that should matter (some Intel WiFi cards, like the AX201 and AX211 exclusively work with Intel CPUs, but the AX210 is universal).
I did a similar transition, the only thing that surprised me was the AMD board ships with secure boot enabled so all your EFI files will fail to launch until you’ve disabled that. Otherwise, it went smoothly with the only hardware changes being the ram and motherboard.
I recommend keeping the Intel Wifi. The driver is more mature and the speed should be about the same. If you want to reuse the old mainboard in a separate case or whatever, you might want to buy another AX210 from your favourite online shop.
That said, my AMD Framework came with the AMD RZ616 and I haven’t had any problems with Fedora 39 yet.
Well looking at the be200 that isn’t a surprise, the ax210 works like a charm in both but the be200 doesn’t post on the amd and if you plug it into a egpu enclosure and connect it to the amd it hard crashes the system XD.