Framework Fedex Travel Guide and Tips

This just arrived via FedEx, just barely. Uh FedEx really was trying to make sure that I didn't get it. Uh they tossed it on its end. It's a little rain soaked. There's a couple things poked. Like there's a broken cardboard here. Uh the corner is smashed. FedEx really not fabulous. But this is the new Framework 13. We're going to take a look. Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3. I've had a few people say that means this is the Core i3. No, no, no. Series 3, 300 series. Panther Lake. It's quite an upgrade over first and second series. Low power. I've seen Panther Lake in person. I' I've followed Panther Lake since it was a prototype board running

low wattage. I'm very excited for this. Let's take a look. Okay, full disclosure. Framework sent me this early. I ordered this. Well, I ordered a framework 13, the new framework 13, but wasn't fast enough and I think I was like series 2 or whatever. This is one of the production ones cuz I talked to Framework when they were working on this and they said, "Hey, we have some pre-production. You know, you might be interested." And it's like, "Well, I mean, just no, I want the production version. I want to experience like the real thing. I want to know what the laptop is actually going to be because Framework has uh some lofty goals. This is the kit version by the way.

Bezel we will not be bedazzling that later. Here's the input cover kit. And then internally we have the SN7100 1 TBTE. Oo, a power brick. 100 watts at 20 volts of output. Uh, less watts for less than 20 volts of output. I got USBC, USBA, HDMI, and another USBC. Framework has several of these now, including a 10 GB adapter based on the Realtech uh, chipset, which is fantastic. Here's our assembly tool. Some assembly required, our right angle type-C cable, and our power bricks power cord. And this is our LP CAM DDR module.

Now, since I've been working on this, Framework emailed everybody. It's like, "Hey, your order has been bumped from 32 gigs to 16 gigs if you order 32 gigs of LP cam memory." That's okay. I've already got 32 gigs of memory, so I can test it. And I can test it at the 7662 mega transfers or whatever it is because that's the fastest official speed that this Intel platform supports. But it's going to be disappointing for those of you that pre-ordered 32 gigs and you got bumped down to 16 gigs. But it's availability. Scan here to get started. I need to do that probably. And we have our framework stickers.

Multiple different kinds of stickers. Hey, look. This sticker is that fancy 10 gigabit adapter. And then we've also got some, you know, helpful other stuff. It's black just like my heart. Internally, you can see how serviceable and repairable these things are. These QR codes, you scan these and it will take you to the assembly manual. And it's really pretty straightforward to deal with this. The battery ever craps out, it's pretty easy to replace. This is a 74.45watt hour battery and replacement parts easily available. Speakers, replacement parts, easily available. I want to change the Wi-Fi because, you know, it's a it's almost a religious

argument these days. We can change the Wi-Fi to be whatever brand of Wi-Fi you want. Linux people know what I'm talking about. We got a pretty interesting heat pipe design here. You see a thermal pad for our M.2 connecting here. Now, this is interesting because an M.2 too like our SN7100. You know, this is the part that gets hot. Well, this I mean the NAND also gets hot, but NAND being hot is not really a big deal. NAND sort of wants to run warm. And so this thermal pad connects this controller thermally to the chassis and then that works really well. When you're considering an M.2 for a system like this, you really want to consider getting an M.2 that's going to be low power or that, you know, has a

laptop in mind. Samsung not always the right choice. Like there was a time where it's like the gold standard of NVME was the Samsung 980, but the Samsung 980, especially in a laptop like this, which has got a lot of design optimizations for low power, not a great choice. In fact, it shouldn't even be in your top 10. Not just because it's old, but also because wasn't really designed for a laptop. Even basic things like PCIe error correction could be problematic. The SN7100 has been very well tested in this and that is a perfectly fine and reasonable solution. I also really like Fison controllerbased M.2. But here is a different model M.2. Notice the controller for it is here.

This would not be a good choice because this is not making thermal contact like one would hope and so you will not dissipate heat. uh through the chassis. Now, you can move the thermal pad. No problem at all. Just move the thermal pad to be where you need it. Now, we're going to have a pretty good connection and it's going to work great. You can use a double-sided M.2 in this slot, but you will have to use a thinner thermal pad from Framework. Framework has information about that in their build guide. They may or may not. I don't know. I need to look. for our SN7100.

Uh, it's fine. The thermal pad placement is totally okay the way that it is. You'll want to use the spudger tool. There is a very thin layer of plastic. And I promise you, your M.2 will find it much more appealing in terms of thermal management if you peel this away. One. Two. Oo, three LP cam retention modules. Inside there's a transparent piece of plastic because reasons. And then look at that. Look at the tiny gold contacts. It's so little. So now all we have to do is mount our LPAM module up to 64 GB. As you mount your memory module, be sure not to catch the little orange flap in the machinery. Mounting the M.2 screw is really easy.

You just pop the screw out, slide in your M.2, and then put it back. That's pretty much it for the pre preassembly. The only thing we've got left to do is to install our input cover kit and the bezel and add our expansion modules. The modules are so cool because you can decide what ports you want. If you want four USBC ports, you can do that. If you want only one USBC port, you can do that because you need it for charging. But HDMI, display port, you got a lot of options. Uh micro SD card reader, there's there's a ton of a whole universe of options. 3D printable as well. That's what Framework likes to do. They like to open up a lot of options.

Now this is the part that's exciting because uh deck flexibility. No touchpad. Yes. New touchpad design, new keyboard, new input, new chassis. There are a whole universe of decorative bezels available to you as well. Just check out the options on Framework's website. And yes, it does have magnetic assist. There's little magnets in there to help you get it installed. And yes, it does have a mechanical shutter for the privacy of your webcam as well as a mechanical disconnect for the microphones.

Now, I can guess what you're wondering. Oh, where's the screws? They're in a tiny little bag inside the box. You missed it. Nope. They're captured. Yay. Serviceability. And then we just have to install the modules on the bottom. Now, sometimes it's worth checking the diagram because different framework laptops have different functionality and different USBC ports. I think they I mean they've put some of their CE labeling and the QR codes that explain that there, but I think they could also put small text to be like, "Hey, put the USBC charger here."

I can also see a future where Framework just builds in one USBC port that is for charging or whatever because I mean, you get that with the combination headphone microphone port that's on this side of the laptop. But, you know, I don't know. It's it's an aesthetic. It's a design choice. It's fine. This one's a type A port to get my type A USBC and one orange one just because I like to be weird. I do like the fact that you can lay it flat. I like that it immediately tells you the memory training is in progress. Very few machines actually do that. It's a very nice quality of life improvement. Good job framework. This framework bias as

most framework bi I think pretty much every framework bias is inside which is the company that actually makes the things before things are styled. We can view the regulatory information. We can boot from efi from a file. We can go into the boot manager. We go into setup utility core ultra 7 358h 7467 mega transfers for LPDDR memory. 32768 32 gigs detected correctly. Everything is looking fantastic here. And notice that LP Cam quick training 32 gigs. That's uh impressive. This is even though it's just the one card, this is a dual channel configuration. So you've got full bandwidth here on this

platform. It's fabulous. There's a lot of cool stuff in the EFI for gear heads and people that want to customize their system, but I want to talk specifically about the battery charge limit thing. If your laptop mostly you just use it on a desk and you don't travel with it very much, it is worth setting the battery charge limit to a lower value like 80%. And even the help text here suggests 60%. Uh, frameworks added something in this BIOS on this laptop that I haven't seen before, which is battery extender, which is after 5 days of having been on the charge, it's going to lower the charge threshold because you can ruin your battery, your laptop battery, by keeping it charged to 100% all the time.

These things are stored, they're stored with like a 40 to 50% charge, give or take. maybe 55% or 60% but it falls from 50 or 60% down to like 40%. And that is the safest way to store the battery and not actually use the battery. But this trigger reset mechanic here lets the laptop sort of automatically try to deal with it. But I think if you're aware of it and you can just go into BIOS and tweak it if you're watching videos, you know, at level one, this is useful information. You could just set the charge limit. And I'm in fact I'm going to go ahead and set the charge limit to 90%. Because I would like the battery to last kind of a long time, but I'm also going to be testing it a lot. Actually, this

is a bad idea because I need to test it from 100%. But later, I'll probably come in and set it to like 80 or 90%. Probably not 60%. But it's a nice feature to have in BIOS. This does support TPM and secure boot and you can configure that. You can configure what certificates are enrolled. You can reset the TPM. Full options there. You also have chassis intrusion detection, which is awesome because if chassis intrusion is triggered, require bios supervisor password on the next boot. Pretty cool. Power on AC attach disabled. Useful if you're going to dock this thing because docking is fun. You can boot off the network if you enable the network stack. USB booting is of course supported and enabled. You can

also configure the boot order. And it also detects my SSD, which I'm going to have to go uh do some stuff to make sure that it can boot from that. Gonna got to probably reinstall the operating system. What would you like the co-pilot key to be? Al also known as right control right in the BIOS right control. That right there is worth the price. There are people that are going to buy this laptop just for that BIOS feature because they hate co-pilot that much. Yes, I would like for my control key to be my right control key to be co-pilot. And you'll notice what is that key labeled on the right?

Yeah, it doesn't. It's labeled control. Who wants to lose control? Am I right? All right. Before we get to the nitty-gritty in the benchmarks, let me give you some more context because handheld gaming with Panther Lake is definitely a thing and it's because low power and fun stuff that they've added to the platform and just Panther Lake innovation. So this is Intel, but obviously framework has done a lot of work here too because how else would we have power utilization on the order of like 2 3 4 watts. And so if you look at gameplay or other stressful scenarios like that when this thing is running on battery, you know, it's running at about 15 watts max. And that's why I can get

four to five hours of gameplay out of it when I'm playing something like Monster Train. Even though I'm playing Monster Train, it's capping out at basically 15 watts. Actually, a little less in monster train. And it's able to run just fine from eight efficiency cores. Because remember the core configuration, you got four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and then four low power efficiency cores. Framework advertises this thing is up to 20 hours or so with Netflix. I was actually able to beat that in this configuration. If we look at power utilization when the keyboard is on, the keyboard backlight is turned up or when the backlight of the 13.3 in touch display is

turned up, we can affect the power usage a watt or two in the context of three or five watts of power utilization, but we've got a 75watt hour battery basically. So yeah, you can get upwards of 20 hours of power on time, but normal working day, like can you get 12 hours out of this? Yes, you absolutely can get 12 hours out of this without really making too many sacrifices, at least on the Linux side. Look, look at this lunacy. 14 hours and 22 minutes on 50% battery life. Like it's we're at 64% battery. And we still have 12, 13, 14 hours to go. The Windows side, we have a separate conversation to talk about, especially when it's gaming and everything like that. On the Windows side, the gaming

situation is much more of a first class experience than on Linux currently. Not to say that Linux has any problems with gaming. Now, when you plug this into the wall, you're going to see a 35 to 60 watt configuration, but I'm not joking when I say that this is probably the best laptop experience that Intel has ever pulled off. And because this is the pro version of the Framework, and Framework has really upped their game and stepped into the hardware and the engineering, the CNC chassis, and also the touchpad, the haptic touchpad. This feels like a premium experience. This feels like one of the most premium laptops for Linux that I have ever used.

I've used Linux and Windows on both at this point. But for a first class premium Linux experience, this laptop is basically no compromises in terms of both performance and battery life. It's not too much of a stretch to say that if Intel had put this much work into the battery life and engineering and performance and all the little details, all the things outside the core, like you don't hyperfocus on the x86 core part of it. you focus on the entire rest of the platform for power shavings. That is what has happened and come to life in this platform. Had Intel done this all the way a long time ago for Steve Jobs, I don't think Apple would have bothered with ARM CPUs at all because this is

amazing. At the same time, there is a little bit of a downside here in that, you know, for Apple, one of their tests that they like to do is with the power brick or without power brick. And for the Panther Lake CPU in this with power brick is going to give you significantly better performance. We've only got the single cooling fan on the bottom, but from 15 watts to 45 watts for this CPU does make a significant performance difference. And this is also an insane dramatic improvement over where Intel used to be because Intel not that long ago you would have a mobile CPU that when it was plugged in, it would use 100 watts. It would sound like a streaming jet engine. And the performance

difference that you got from moving from 20 25 watts to 100 watts was not that significant. It scales fairly linearly here. The other surprising thing is that do you actually even need those peak cores? When I've been gaming mobile, most of the games most of the performance to get basically the same performance out of this about 1080p 50 60 and most older AAA titles and modern AA titles again 1080p medium high. We're not in a situation where we really need those p cores. They're there. We can use them. It's pretty awesome having 16 cores and 16 threads, eight efficiency cores, four performance cores, four low power cores on this platform to be able to use. That works

great. Suspend, resume, close the lid, open the lid, work perfectly. The resume time on this thing is breathtaking. How long does it take to wake from sleep? What? It's easy to get used to when you just open the laptop and you can start computing. This is not a thing that I'm used to with my deep and storied history on the Linux side of things. Very nice to be able to enjoy on this platform. Usually I have to put work into making that work. Here it's just like, oh yeah, install it. You're good to go. Fingerprint sensor. The power button is a fingerprint sensor. It is fully supported on Linux. Works great on Linux. The screen itself is a

touchscreen. Also works great on Linux. It's a matte display. Framework. I got a prediction for you. People are going to build some cyber decks out of this display. Two of these 2880 by 1920 in a portrait configuration. This is going to be a uh fertile crop for hackers working on cool cyber decks and other custom things based on this display. It's a really nice display. 700 nits max brightness. The sound situation is also improved. Dolby. Yeah. So, there you go. I'm here in [snorts] the basement RF chamber where used office furniture goes to die. Testing the Wi-Fi on the Framework 13 and uh with the ingenious ECW536 with multi-link operation and uh the uh the network card can use

significant amounts of power, couple of watts, but 3 and a half Gbit is attainable. And Basement Cat is helping test. Look who's helping me test the Wi-Fi and also get Catar in the fan. What have we [snorts] add? An RTX Pro 6000 to our framework 13 via Thunderbolt 4. Actually, Razer's Thunderbolt 5 enclosure, but it'll work just fine at Thunderbolt 4 speeds. 48 gigs of VRAM. Does anything weird happen? Does our kernel crash? Whoopsy doodle. Our kernel does indeed crash. Fast forward another couple hours of testing. It's fine. and you just have the bar space problem to worry about and a couple other minor

things. Thunderbolt 4 is fine. You just need to update your kernel and make sure that your MMU is equal to PT for pass through. Sometimes you can pick up an older Thunderbolt 3 or four dock, especially the ones that were made for an older like 150 or 200 watt GPU. You can throw a network card or anything in there and use it as like a pseudo docking station. That is a good strategy in this day and age of uh limited availability of stuff. You don't necessarily need a new Thunderbolt dock. You can get an old one like a 10 series graphics card. That'll work fine. Then you can pull the 10 series graphics card or even one that was empty that originally had a 10 series graphics card

in it and just put something else in there. It's totally fine. Perfectly reasonable strategy. One of the things that I've been concerned about in the past is when you have to pass a Thunderbolt signal through one of these little cartridges that Framework has. You know, it's a USBC connection back here and then there's some electronics in here and then there's another USBC connection. And this USBC connection back here really is like it's a Thunderbolt connection. Everything is good. Uh sometimes it's a little problematic because you've got signal loss through that. Uh Framework has updated this to support display port 2.1. So UHBR 20 Gbits per channel for channels. And that helps Thunderbolt 4 work really correctly because signal integrity. Now why not

Thunderbolt 5? It has to do with power. Panther Lake does not have Thunderbolt 5 on chip. You can add it via an external interface, but you would have to do it through Oculink or through a direct connection, not through the USBC connection that Framework has in their little modules. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future Framework does something to put, you know, like pogo pins or something at the back of these little modules that just give you direct PCIe lanes. So, you'll always have the USBC connector, but then there'll just be a little circuit board there that pops up that has pogo pins because that is the level of engineer. I mean, that takes a lot of R&D and investment and blah. But if

Framework is commercially successful, I can wish. I can wish, can't I? It's still 2026. And in this bleak, dark time that we're in, I can have my wishes. Your wishes were horses. Okay, so what's the bottom line? This laptop has exceeded my expectations in every way imaginable. Now, I uh borrowed an original Framework 13 when that first launched, and I didn't really like it. is pretty good and I like what Framework is doing. I've always liked what Framework is doing, but it wasn't a good fit for me. And then they launched the Framework 16 and I bought that one and I really enjoyed the Framework 16 and it's

great and that was a good laptop for while I use it. I switched from the Framework 16 to another laptop to be able to run AI stuff and AI stuff on this laptop. You can run like the Gimma 12B model. It'll run the 3 uh you know the ARC graphics here is no slouch. the software stack for running like a 35 or 27 billion parameter model is not there yet for performance reasons. Even though the game performance is pretty good and this being a 32 gig platform with my LPDDR memory, you're you're not going to like local AI, not like some of the local AI workstations, but it can still run local AI like using Handy with Parakeet for voice recognition in real time, no delay. Hello. This is a longer

test. Well, I mean, is it longer? I don't know. It's probably not actually going to be longer, but I'm going to stop recording and try to hit control shift V a little faster. Yeah. So, it's basically instantaneous. That works perfectly. And you could also use other models and that's totally fine. GMA 12, like I said, in LM Studio is reasonably fast. It's about 10 tokens per second. But that kind of thing is really the only thing that's lacking here. I mean our results from PC Mark for battery life, the quality of life uh in Linux on the Intel side of things, the work that Intel has done on the Panther Lake platform and then the

obvious engineering work that Framework has done to dot the eyes and cross the tees as it were. It's stunning. It's a stunning laptop. The CNC engineering, there is no flex in this. all of the hesitation that I had for the previous Framework 13. I get why they say the Framework 13 Pro. This is a pro machine. It does feel like a pro machine. Oh, if you want more benchmarks, there's a full Forix test suite, full benchmark thread on the forum. Be sure to check that out. I'm given [clears throat] to understand some of you in the audience have adopted Framework for your corporate fleet. And you know, as framework has grown over the years, uh maybe that wasn't as good as say like, you know, Lenovo is really

popular and our audience is like, "Oh, we're going to get old ThinkPads because old ThinkPads are amazing for Linux." And ThinkPads are a first class experience in terms of like built like a tank. This framework device feels and acts as built like a tank, even more so than the Framework 16. and the haptic touchpad is second to none on the PC platform. So, Framework has really pulled out all the stops here. Like, Framework might be on the trajectory to become the Valve of laptop companies. For a little bit of an explanation there, like everybody largely agrees that when Gabe Noel, benevolent dictator of Valve, disappears, Steam will just become untenably awful, as evidenced by

every other game platform inevitably becoming untenably awful. Laptop manufacturing a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of a captive audience there. You got to buy something. This is a premium device. I don't even know that it has a premium margin. I think Framework is taking all their profits and dumping it back into the next generation of product. That's what it feels like because this feels like a dramatic improvement over the last couple of generations of product. And certainly Framework in their actions has demonstrated really good stewardship for the overall community. I mean, in terms of like the RAM pricing crisis and what they have done with other models across the universe, the only thing that's that's that's

really just kind of sideways here is this is probably the worst time for Intel to be launching a new CPU platform as good as this is. Intel has not done a better job for a mobile platform overall cohesively in at least the last four or five generations since time in memorial basically. And to have that here on this laptop on my desk and that is this well put together launching at a time when RAM and components are more unaffordable than ever. It is unfortunate timing, but this thing has the goods where it counts in terms of performance and everything else. Oh, one last quick thought. Why the Intel version of this and not the AMD version? Isn't there an AMD like a new Framework Pro 13 with the AMD Ryzen

AI 400? Yes, but the motherboard for that doesn't seem different than the previous frame framework pro and the Ryzen AI 400 is an incremental update to the Ryzen AI300 platform which has been out for like a year or two at this point. Panther Lake is head and shoulders upgrade over the Lunar Lake and the stuff that came before it. So, this is an entirely new platform and entirely new set of graphics and entirely new basically everything. It's basically doover from team Intel and they got a lot of things right. But this will also mean that AMD is going to have to step up in their next generation. AMD AI400 is an incremental improvement over Ryzen AI300. And so for

now in 2026, I think this is a much more interesting platform because of that. And also the motherboard's the same from it's just the ch I mean you could get the pro chassis with the other it's fine but there's a lot going on here. A lot changed at once and yeah, it's pretty good. I model this level one. This has been a quick look at the framework 13 uh pro. It's actually 13 1/2 in for the display. It's pretty awesome. If you have any questions or I miss anything, you want me to try a workload, hit me up in the forum. I'm signing up and I'll see you there. You're signing up. I'm signing out and I'll see you there.