Those things are too rich for my blood, but it seems to me like the concept is a great idea, and it would be nice if something like that became cheaper and standardized across brands.
I’ve always been really annoyed by the fact that laptops with socketed CPUs disappeared a decade ago. And these days a ton of laptop manufacturers are very eager to solder the SSD and RAM as well. This occasionally goes as far as laptops with permanent, soldered single channel RAM, and that’s horrifying. These things are destined to be e-waste, ending up in landfills far sooner than typical for equivalent desktop components.
When you upgrade a desktop you have so many more options that will save you money over buying a totally new system. GPUs are essentially plug 'n play. You can often upgrade the CPU just as easily, though every once in a while you’ll need to replace the motherboard. Same goes for RAM. Everything else can almost always be reused: the case, the fans, the CPU cooler, the storage, the monitor, the mouse, and the keyboard. Even the PSU if you’re not getting a significantly more power hungry CPU or GPU. All of that can add up to a ton of money.
Socketed CPUs in laptops are probably never coming back due to how much space they tend to take up. And laptop GPUs will probably never be socketed in the first place for the same reason. But if you could buy a standardized chassis and simply swap out entire motherboards that come in a standardized laptop form factor, upgrading would be so much more cost efficient, as would laptop repair. Also, lets bring back easily removable and swappable laptop batteries while we’re at it.
Unfortunately, this all flies in the face of the inherent capitalist enshittification going on with consumer electronics, and I’m skeptical Framework will ever be anything more than a very expensive niche for enthusiasts who like to tinker with their devices. But I don’t see any technical reasons why something like this wouldn’t be possible and practical.
Framework’s laptop design revolves around this modularity and advertises it as such.
However, other laptop manufacturers have done this somewhat. I have an HP pavilion laptop that I motherboard swapped because the original one had some issues, so I replaced it with an 8th gen i7 motherboard. It was a noticable improvement over the 7th gen i5 motherboard that it came with originally, but it ran really hot. (yes I had the correct cooler, it just ran really hot even with the i5 and I couldn’t get it to undervolt).
That laptop used a lot of ribbon cables and subboards. Even the power button and charger were on seperate boards which was nice. Even the newer pavilions use that layout. I plan on upgrading my current pavilion laptop to an Ryzen 7 5825u board as the current i5 is not really working out for me. It’s cheaper than buying a new laptop.
I do really like what framework is doing and I do plan on purchasing one of the 16 in models once I get a decent job and when my laptop either breaks and I cannot fix it or I need something faster.
Edit: ideally a desktop would be better for my usecase but due to my current living conditions and requirements of a device, a decently powerful laptop that isn’t super heavy is a better choice
Yes, definitely sometimes you can get away with swapping motherboards on certain laptops despite the fact that such upgrades aren’t explicitly supported. In fact, I’m soon doing this on a Dell Inspiron. Original specs were an i5-1035G1, 8GB of single channel memory, and 256GB NVMe SSD. Since then I’ve upgraded it to 16GB dual channel memory and a 1TB NVMe SSD.
Currently waiting for a higher end SKU of the same model’s motherboard to arrive, I found it on ebay for a steal. It’s got an i7-1165G7 with Iris Xe G7 integrated graphics. Based on benchmarks I’ve seen the new CPU will get around 25% better single core performance. But the new iGPU is going to be a massive 200%+ uplift. That’s still dogshit compared to even lowish end dedicated GPUs, but good enough to run the indie games I play smoothly.
Going up a whole generation and stack tier is pretty good for an unsupported mod like this. Though I’d like to see such a thing become explicitly supported so that I could, for instance, eventually upgrade a few generations at a time, maybe even to a motherboard with a dedicated GPU installed after waiting a couple generations for the price to come down. I did find motherboards with 12th and 13th gen Intel CPUs on newer Inspirons that still retain a very similar chassis, but upon looking into those ones I found they wouldn’t have been compatible with my laptop’s display despite it being the correct size and resolution. Without the manufacturers explicitly doing the engineering to add in support for non-original hardware, eventually things just cease to be compatible despite the fact they easily could have been.
Those Intel igpus are much better than most people give them credit for. It’s no 3050 mobile but on par than an mx350 with basically up to 32 gb of vram. They shipped laptops with that gpu and that cpu. Asus made one which I find funny. These much more powerful igpus killed off the low end dgpu market. Why get an Nvifia mx350 or a Radeon 630 in a laptop when the igpu is just as powerful and more efficient.
Also WDYM not compatible with the display? It’s edp. I do know that HP will issue bios updates to increase compatibility with parts. (an older HP laptop my friend owns had a bios update that did just that). Unless it’s not edp and is something else entirely.
If it’s a touch screen though, it might be more complicated. If it has a seperate digitizer or if it the touch is baked into the panel.
There’s a pretty good chance it actually supports the panel. At least with HP, they source their panels from a bunch of suppliers. LG, Innolux, BOE etc. I’ve only had LG and Innolux panels in my laptops (mainly Innolux), if you search your model of computer, you can find hardware dumps of people’s PCs that run Linux (people share them for ig testing info idk) and they’ll have screen models in them. If you find that you find one laptop that has the same display as yours, it should support it.
Edit: windows is really aggressive with using OEM drivers with the Intel iris xe igpus, like it will reinstall them while running a game aggressive (ok fwiw I left BeamNG running all night because I forgot, and when I checked my laptop in the morning it had crashed and the driver version changed). The drivers are reasonably up to date though.
They’re also kinda buggy. The driver will occasionally restart but not cleanly. My computer will do it’s best impression of a broken display and I’ll have to restart my laptop. I do have it set to automatically restart when it does crash but it’s annoying and I can’t trust it.
Yeah, unfortunately it was a touchscreen panel. Also runs at 60Hz whereas those newer motherboards I was talking about came in laptops that had 120Hz panels. I don’t know for sure if the refresh rate really matters, but I decided not to chance it given they also weren’t touchscreens like mine was.
And yes, the Iris Xe G7, particularly the one I’m getting with 96 execution units, can often compete with an MX350. But the laptop I have won’t be running the thing to its full potential due to some design choices that Dell made. For some reason they’ve firmware limited the RAM to running at 2666MT/s despite having a CPU rated for 3200MT/s and shipping with a RAM stick containing a 3200MT/s CL22 JEDEC profile. An iGPU especially suffers from slower system RAM given it lacks any dedicated VRAM to pull from.
And also it’ll only be running the CPU at a PL1 of 22 Watts instead of the maximum 28 Watts advertised by Intel. Same goes for the CPU I currently have, the i5-1035G1. I’ve inspected the temperatures while it power throttles to 22 watts after the PL2 timer runs out, and it seems there does exist some thermal headroom to maybe increase the power limit a bit. I’ve looked into BIOS modding to check if it might be plausible to alter the PL1, but I was unable to find a single example anywhere on the internet of someone successfully altering the EC enforced power limits on a laptop containing either an Ice Lake U or a Tiger Lake UP3 CPU. Looks like these things are pretty locked down compared to laptops with Intel’s H series CPUs.
Is it built into the panel or just a seperate digitizer.
Also something you might be able to do is remove Intel dynamic thermal framework if that’s installed on your computer, it will increase it somewhat. Downside it will make it run very hot
Built into the panel.
And I’ve looked into removing IDTF to try and increase the power limits previously, it doesn’t work because the thing that’s causing the power throttling is the embedded controller, and there’s no safe way to modify that thing. I’ve seen some tricks involving altering the IMON slope in the BIOS setup to report a fake, lowered power consumption to the EC to trick it into not throttling, but I’ve never seen anyone get it to work on an Intel G series processor. I’ve seen it work successfully on 8th gen and older U series processors, pretty much all H series processors, and 12th gen and newer U series processors, but infuriatingly not on any CPU carrying the G suffix.
Honestly it’s not worth it. It runs super hot as is at it’s current tdp limit.
Most laptops do have the barest minimum amount of cooling to dissipate their TDP, but in my laptop there’s some thermal headroom. Once the fan gets going at maximum RPM and the laptop power throttles to 22 watts, the temperature stabilizes around 85 to 90 degrees. The maximum temperature it reaches before thermal throttling is 100 degrees, so I think it could most likely handle 25 watts sustained and up to 40 watts in bursts, at least in the winter.