the allnew framework 16 is here and I am super excited about it not only because
I invested my own money in this company and I want them to succeed but because
it has several tricks up its sleeve that are genuinely nutty that's right for
years companies have struggled to make an upgradable laptop at all let alone
one meant for gaming but it's finally here and did I mention that every single
part of this machine can be purchased individually on their store and rep
placed by the end user what world is this unfortunately a world where trying
to be objective doesn't change the fact that I have a vested interest in
framework success which makes reviewing their products a bit tricky so I don't
want you to take my word for it the rest of the script I haven't even read it to
recuse myself from our review Alex our resident laptop connoisseur Jake who
actually holds an active framework 16 pre-order and John from the lab are
going to be telling you guys all about it both the good and the bad um fingers
crossed that they didn't bite off more than they can chew with this thing
unlike this easily digestible segue to our sponsor seic their Prime tx1000 wat
power supply features an 80 plus titanium rating hybrid fan control and a
12-year warranty which is why I love them more than my own son I mean I go
back and forth he's only three he's not going to see this learn more at sees
sonic.com or the link below let's start with the framework 16's key party trick
unlike every other laptop I've used everything on the surface is modular
save the power button up here that has a fingerprint sensor in it you can adjust
the keyboard and trackpad positioning you can add a num pad or a macro pad on
the right here or the left if you want or if that macropad isn't flashy enough
for you they even have these led Matrix displays do these do anything besides
reducing battery life no do I really
like them yes now all of this modularity
I would classify as neat however the
other new party trick the bespoke upgradeable removable discret AMD
graphics card is so sick many companies
have attempted to put upgradeable Graphics in a laptop in the past but the
upgrade operation has never been something that I'd recommend the average
Tech Enthusiast to undertake framework however says the GPU swap can be done in
a couple minutes so let's test that theory first power down the system then
unlock the tabs and take off the touchpad and the keyboard
open the little plastic flap here covering the custom interposer and
unscrew these four T5 screws and remove it from the system framework includes a
screwdriver with this laptop but the noock with Screwdriver from LTT
store.com is a little bit nicer thankfully these screws are captive so
you'll be hardpressed to lose them just make sure you don't lose the interposer
itself I'd recommend screwing it back into the GPU once you have that out
speaking of which just remove two more screws and the entire GPU should slide
out damn
look at that now it isn't quite as easy
as they made it look on the website it isn't like a Game Boy cartridge but at
the same time compared to every other GPU swap on a laptop I've done holy heck
this was seamless and if you don't want a GPU you can just save over half a
pound of weight and an inch of length by just not having a GPU anymore but all of
this modularity comes at a steep price possibly for my boss because the key
keyboard on the framework 16 is frankly unacceptable for a laptop of this price
the closest comparison I have is the Acer Nitro 5 which starts at
$750 and it is just okay at
$750 while testing the framework 16 I wasn't able to get up to my full typing
speed in particular while doing really quick double presses due to the chassis
Flex a huge disappointment compared to the excellent keyboard on the framework
13 but it isn't all bad news see the
problem here here is the mid plate particularly in this area and with the
keyboard off you can really just see how
not supportive this super thin piece of
metal is fortunately this being a framework disassembling only takes about
a minute and we were able to chuck some thermal pads in the areas where it was
squishiest and holy crap that is so much
better the amount that the chassis Flex influences the feel of your keyboard is
huge and the difference that this mod has made is just night and day with the
thermal pads in there this keyboard isn't quite on the level of ASUS or
alien wear but it comfortably beats MSI and razor and brings it much more in
line with the price while you're modifying things you might want to use a couple pieces of electrical tape to
remedy some of the small but visible gaps between the modules but at least
the trackpad down here is excellent It's glass topped with accurate and
responsive tracking I just wish it was a little bit B bigger another sacrifice
for the modularity one decision I really
don't understand though are the speakers which fire out from the sides instead of
like up at you or bouncing off of the table like everything else that sounds
good for comparison here's a similarly priced Lenovo Legion slim
7i okay the Lenovo the Lenovo is not too
bad little bit quiet but I would say perfectly acceptable and the framework
is uh
it's not the worst I've ever heard but it lacks um treble and bass and
staging get yourself a Bluetooth speaker
what is really good though is the dedicated GPU output on the back this is
wired directly to the GPU now Jake wrote here that he wants me to complain about
this not being a fulls siiz DisplayPort but personally I think this typc is fine
so uh one second I'm stupid BMW drivers
great car we asked and they said that they
tried it just wouldn't fit with the giant heat pipes they're using to cool
it but for sakes guys you founded your
company on a laptop with modular IO meant to solve the dongle crisis and
you're telling me I need to carry one again wait a second modular
iio no way I don't know how I didn't think about
that we got to see if this works no way
look at that John didn't believe it 4K 120 baby nice which is how I describe
the io situation in general with two more IO slots than the 13 it has the
capacity to connect virtually any device you can think of they have modules for
USBC capable of 240 W charging usba a
DisplayPort HDMI 2.0 micro SD 2.5 gig
Ethernet audio and expanded storage but
they also release the design so literally anyone with the right skills
can design and sell their own modules including for the GPU slot now even when
there isn't a GPU installed some of that space is occupied by the CPUs cooling
fans but they've already released a reference dual SSD design as an example
I'm just excited to have a place to put my Mountain Dew without sacrificing I/O
coming from an Intel based MacBook Pro with a grand total of four USB type-c
ports this was the biggest breath of fresh air across my entire experience
sure Apple just including decent IO would fix most of that but if your needs
change or you want to do something silly like running four displays off your
laptop you don't need a dongle at least not an external one now speaking of
external the power brick is this cute little 180 W gallium nitride unit and
it's the highest wattage type-c charger I've ever heard of and a far cry at
least in terms of size for most gaming laptop power brakes good job there
framework also improved from their first laptop is the disassembly experience
since all of the screws are accessible from the top of the laptop so replacing
any part of this laptop is an absolute Joy now if you're not an experienced
tinkerer framework has guides for replacing literally every part of the
laptop that's because if you're a nerd you can buy this laptop IKEA style and
put it together yourself and I take assembling a framework laptop over doing
Ikea furniture any day of the week if you missed our framework factory tour a
little tidbit is that they actually pre-assemble the DIY Edition laptops for
QC and stress testing and then they get taken apart before shipping so you can
build it yourself don't believe it's that easy well it took about this long
to get the entire laptop to Pieces we've got the 85w battery Wi-Fi 6E module a
Radeon RX 7700s inside the GPU module a
ryzen 78 or 7940 HS powered main board
two ddr5 sodm slots two gen 4 m.2 slots
and if you're not happy with the configurations you can see on screen here the DIY Edition can be ordered in
pretty much any config you want or Bare Bones and you can supply your own
storage and ramp which made picking laptops to Benchmark against uh a little
tricky to see what you can get in a similarly priced and classed bigname
laptop we opted for an Intel NVIDIA spec Lenovo Legion slim 7i and to make sure
our framework is performing as it should an ASUS tough a16 it's cheaper and it
was supposed to be the same specs as the framework 16 that was until they shipped
the lower end model for the Press unit the differences between the CPUs are
minor so it should still tell us if the framework is performing up to Snuff
despite those differences every game is actually a pretty tight race in cyber
Punk nearly maxed out at 1080p the Intel based Lenovo is slightly ahead in
average FPS with both itself and the AMD based ASUS model beating the framework
by one frame and 1% lows in f123 Intel's
Gap widens a bit while the framework makes a modest showing in second place
surprisingly beating out the on paper faster ASUS to no one's surprise in
Total War Warhammer 3 the 470 wins again
but our framework squeaks past the ASUS again too it's hard to say what exactly
is giving it the advantage in these games but the faster memory and better
cooling on the framework likely has something to do with it as for productivity the framework 16 loses
handily in cin bench both single and multi-core but no surprises there as the
ASUS has a lot more thermal head room when it doesn't have to cool a GPU at
the same time in blender our ASUS laptop crushes the framework across the board
despite the only real difference being a slightly higher Bas and boost clock and
the same can be said for video encoding with handbrake and in media editing with
Premier and photo shop overall not a lot of surprises here the faster CPU in the
ASUS shines in productivity but we expect the higher-end framework would
yield the same result as for gaming yeah
it's not a great price to Performance option but it's not terrible either it's
just that if you want the most frames for your money this isn't the laptop to
buy also you should probably just buy a desktop but if you do buy one or really
any electronic you care about you should protect it with a skin and dbrand
sponsored this portion of the video so lonus could show you how being a
relatively new company not many third parties are making accessories for
framework machines but the brand sure is
and they're going to be ready for launch day they sent over two so I guess I get
to pick whichever one would be easier for case toy to rip
off allegedly oh they're both the same
my notes say look how accurate these internals are no wonder they got so
pissed they got ripped off but I actually haven't had this thing open yet
so maybe probably while I completely ignore
D Brand's explicit instructions for how to do this and make up my own method
always check their site and make sure that you do it the right way what am I
supposed to be saying though I know they're paying me to put a skin on a
laptop right now but this is my favorite kind of integration we're all working
together to promote something we believe in yeah yeah as both an investor and
hobbyist hey thanks dbrand shout out so I think I've got
it pretty decently lined up right now uh
there's no way this battery is made in Canada that's got to be any egg
framework's Canadian there are Canadian Bros did I say framework
D framework's not Canadian oh it's not
quite straight A okay okay I'm ready to submit
for inspection how' I do just don't look
right there just don't look right where don't worry about it don't right where
oh where it's not bad pretty flat yeah
yeah oh hey 5'1 line it oh I know when
I'm insulted check out dbrand at the link down below over to you John
framework did great in our battery endurance test both with and without the
GPU beating ASUS and Lenovo by a few
hours the combuster stress test was a lot closer but it still won and if you
rip out the GPU you'll get even more battery life however none of these
laptops are industry-leading for battery life but if the battery in the framework
starts to struggle after after a few years at least you can easily replace it
as for cooling they partnered with Cooler Master to design this gigantic
heat pipe array which paired with the liquid metal resulted in combuster
tempts that absolutely crushed the a16 from ASUS which is running the exact
same RX 7700s the framework did Peak higher than
the lenovo's RTX 470 but once the fans
ramped up it held its own it's important to mention that the Lenovo unit was
repaced with noct nth1 in a previous project so it could be possible that the
framework would look even better here to a factory Lenovo remember the F1 stress
test the framework performs exceptionally well staying under 65 Dees
on the CPU while the ASUS and the Lenovo
are both hitting over 70 or even
80° and that's while maintaining a very
solid 4.1 GHz on the average clock speed
while the a16 averaged closer to 2.7
yikes to be fair we ran all these laptops in their default power
configurations but the tough a16s Radeon
7700s is reporting 80° average on the
core and 93 on the Hotpot the framework
kept to a much more reasonable 68 and 80 Dees respectively the webcam and
microphone which use the same module as the framework 13 very cool look and
sound like this at least with a big Studio light in front of me and if you
shut it off like this and a pretty dim crappy
environment not great not terrible and I did anecdotally hear that the microphone
sounded better than my airpods Pro too so cool and they do at least have
physical shut off switches which is a nice touch and we haven't even talked
about the display the framework 16 holds its own when it comes to color accuracy
reaching an average SDR Delta of 1.5 and
a Max of 2.8 in part thanks to Windows Auto color management system which only
seems to support a few select displays it ships with it turned off making the
number numbers much worse so we'd recommend using it the display is bright
enough for outdoors at over 500 nits motion Clarity is decent enough at 165
HZ which is great for gaming but there are a couple of issues that are a bit
hard to ignore like the honestly kind of mid uniformity that results in visible
vignetting on web pages and solid backgrounds and somehow our unit's panel
was pinched under the removable plastic bezel for some reason it kind of looks
like you could move it around but ah this leads me to the price as configured
ignoring extra accessories like the expansion shell which isn't included if
you spec a GPU and cost $100 on its own
this is a $2,200 laptop they're not
gouging remember it's a small company building an entirely bespoke laptop that
genuinely could and seems to already be changing an entire
industry but it's not cheap either the
keyboard stability and display uniform it are things that would normally be a
deal breaker for me especially at this price point and I wouldn't blame you for
feeling the same but here's the thing fixing the keyboard is probably
something you can DIY as Alex showed earlier and assuming framework either
fixes the issues or comes up with a panel upgrade down the road I can
probably live with that display for a while for the utter flexibility
repairability and the simple fact that this could be theoretically the last
gaming laptop I'd ever need to buy that's pretty freaking cool so as long
as framework stays in business and follows through with their promises I
mean they already have a history of doing so when the CPU is too outdated or
the GPU isn't strong enough for new games or the keyboard gets gunked up and
the battery dies it's an easy swap instead of chucking away an entire
machine you could have your very own laptop of thesis and I can't wait to see
what the future holds all that's left is to decide if I want to keep my pre-order
but think of the modules Jake right and
maybe they can make a module that would help me segue to our sponsor Jawa we've
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graphics card and then save on a new one thanks for watching I hope it's good
this is my first hands on with a retail one just sitting down here right now if
you guys liked this video make sure to check out our framework laptop factory
tour we'll have that linked down below