Review: Framework’s Laptop 16 is unique, laudable, fascinating, and flawed

Now that the Framework Laptop 13 has been through three refresh cycles—including one that swapped from Intel's CPUs to AMD's within the exact same body—the company is setting its sights on something bigger.

Today, we're taking an extended look at the first Framework Laptop 16, which wants to do for a workstation/gaming laptop what the Framework Laptop 13 did for thin-and-light ultraportables. In some ways, the people who use these kinds of systems need a Framework Laptop most of all; they're an even bigger investment than a thin-and-light laptop, and a single CPU, GPU, memory, or storage upgrade can extend the useful life of the system for years, just like upgrading a desktop.

The Laptop 16 melds ideas from the original Framework Laptop with some all-new mechanisms for customizing the device's keyboard, adding and upgrading a dedicated GPU, and installing other modules. The result is a relatively bulky and heavy laptop compared to many of its non-upgradeable alternatives. And you'll need to trust that Framework delivers on its upgradeability promises somewhere down the line since the current options for upgrading and expanding the laptop are fairly limited.

But the company has done a great job of building trust with the Framework Laptop 13—if you don't mind the design of the Laptop 16, there's a reasonably good chance you'll have appealing upgrades to grab. In a year or two.

Design touches and new upgrades

The Laptop 16 (bottom, obviously) is a lot bigger than the Laptop 13—and most other 15-to-16-inch laptops.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The new Framework Laptop is a whole lot bigger than the old one—without its dedicated GPU installed, it's nearly two pounds heavier, 3 inches wider, and 1.5 inches deeper. Adding the graphics module adds another two-thirds of a pound and almost an inch of extra depth.

The whole point of it is that it's bigger than the original—the star of the show is a lovely matte non-touch panel with a 2560×1600 resolution, a 16:10 aspect ratio, and roughly 97 percent DCI-P3 gamut coverage. But it's striking just how much bigger the laptop is, while devices like the Dell XPS 15 or Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro have at least tried to retain some of the slimness of those companies' smaller notebooks.

While the Laptop 16's height, width, and weight aren't totally out of the ordinary for a laptop this size—all three numbers are on the high side, but even with the GPU installed they aren't breaking any records—but the laptop with its dedicated GPU module installed is around two inches deeper than most of the laptops we spot-checked it against. That increases its footprint by a lot, and may keep it from fitting in some bags comfortably.

The design of the Framework Laptop 16 is a unique mix of clunky and clever. It retains some of the external design compromises from the Laptop 13 (a fairly boxy design, thick bezels) and adds a few of its own. The expansion module that contains the GPU juts out from the back of the laptop past the lid, something I associate more with monstrous, unpleasant 17-inch gaming laptops, and the seams all over the keyboard and wrist rest area make it look sort of unfinished.

But this external awkwardness is mostly done in service of an internal elegance, and there are a ton of handy design touches made to boost the laptop's modularity and upgradeability.

The Framework Laptop 16's customizable keyboard area is one of the cooler things about it. Here's a centered keyboard with individually programmable RGB backlighting, flanked by a pair of neat-but-superfluous "LED Matrix" spacers.

Andrew Cunningham

The Framework Laptop 16's customizable keyboard area is one of the cooler things about it. Here's a centered keyboard with individually programmable RGB backlighting, flanked by a pair of neat-but-superfluous "LED Matrix" spacers. Andrew Cunningham

The first step toward taking the Laptop 16 apart is pulling out these small tabs on each side, which allow you to slide out these spacers.

Andrew Cunningham

The first step toward taking the Laptop 16 apart is pulling out these small tabs on each side, which allow you to slide out these spacers. Andrew Cunningham

The Framework Laptop 16's customizable keyboard area is one of the cooler things about it. Here's a centered keyboard with individually programmable RGB backlighting, flanked by a pair of neat-but-superfluous "LED Matrix" spacers. Andrew Cunningham

The first step toward taking the Laptop 16 apart is pulling out these small tabs on each side, which allow you to slide out these spacers. Andrew Cunningham

Removing the trackpad is the next step. Observe the metal contacts on both the laptop and the trackpad module.

Andrew Cunningham

Removing the trackpad is the next step. Observe the metal contacts on both the laptop and the trackpad module. Andrew Cunningham

I usually use the Laptop 16 with its keyboard centered, but a couple different numpad modules (including this "RGB macropad") exist.

Andrew Cunningham

I usually use the Laptop 16 with its keyboard centered, but a couple different numpad modules (including this "RGB macropad") exist. Andrew Cunningham

Removing the trackpad is the next step. Observe the metal contacts on both the laptop and the trackpad module. Andrew Cunningham

I usually use the Laptop 16 with its keyboard centered, but a couple different numpad modules (including this "RGB macropad") exist. Andrew Cunningham

The most impressive is the keyboard and trackpad area, which is one big replaceable slab on Framework 13, but on Framework 16, it is fully customizable. This is enabled by a clever system of magnets and copper contact pads that allow the keyboard, trackpad, and other components to connect to the motherboard via the USB bus without involving the bendy, fiddly ribbon cables that usually connect laptop keyboards and trackpads. Everything in the keyboard and wrist rest area can be fully disassembled and reassembled without tools, just like the expansion bays for ports (up to six, from the Framework Laptop 13's four, but without a built-in headphone jack).

Of all of the new stuff in the Framework Laptop 16, this is also the part that most obviously one-ups the experience of opening up the original Framework Laptop. All of these components can be shifted around without exposing the laptop's sensitive internal components or even turning the computer off, making it dead easy to remix and experiment. Capable web-based interfaces for programming the keyboard's RGB backlight, customizing macros, and adjusting other settings are also available. We'd like to see some more offline fallbacks available for this so you're not completely screwed if the website ever goes away—offline beta apps are available for the cosmetic "LED Matrix" add-ons, so hopefully it's coming for the keyboard eventually, too.

Sliding out the "expansion bay shell," which is mostly empty except for a pair of cooling fans.

Andrew Cunningham

Sliding out the "expansion bay shell," which is mostly empty except for a pair of cooling fans. Andrew Cunningham

Once the keyboard is up, you'll see this little access panel that tells you to turn the power off before proceeding.

Andrew Cunningham

Once the keyboard is up, you'll see this little access panel that tells you to turn the power off before proceeding. Andrew Cunningham

Under that door you'll see the area where the expansion module connects to the rest of the system (in this picture, the connecting piece has already been taken out; these are just the contacts).

Andrew Cunningham

Under that door you'll see the area where the expansion module connects to the rest of the system (in this picture, the connecting piece has already been taken out; these are just the contacts). Andrew Cunningham

Once the keyboard is up, you'll see this little access panel that tells you to turn the power off before proceeding. Andrew Cunningham

Under that door you'll see the area where the expansion module connects to the rest of the system (in this picture, the connecting piece has already been taken out; these are just the contacts). Andrew Cunningham

The module is connected to an eight-lane PCIe interface and power with this small interposer.

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The GPU module (top) is considerably faster than the integrated GPU, but it also takes up a lot of space and weighs more.

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The other big coup for expandability and upgradeability is the removable GPU. The Framework Laptop 16 uses a sort of compression-attached physical interposer (it's two surfaces filled with copper contacts for data and power, pressed up against each other with screws) to provide an eight-lane PCI Express interface for extra accessories. This could eventually lead to the creation of expansion modules that do pretty much anything—Framework says one with extra M.2 slots for more SSDs is on its way, and everything about the interface Framework is using is publicly available on GitHub—but dedicated graphics modules are probably the most obvious kind of accessory (more on this Framework Laptop's specific graphics module in a bit).

Framework has written a bit about developing both of these internal connectors, including the work it did to make the interposer from the graphics module something that could stand up to repeated removal and reinstallation. I've detached the graphics module from my review unit twice without issue—as long as you're careful about making sure things line up properly and not forcing anything, you should be fine.

The GaN 180 W charger, top, compared to a recent-ish 200 W charger from a 15-inch HP workstation.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The other nice thing about the Laptop 16 design is its charger, which at 180 W could be gigantic but is actually relatively svelte thanks to newfangled gallium nitride (GaN) technology. Even a couple of years ago, this wouldn't have been possible, both because GaN was relatively new and because USB-C's peak power limit didn't exceed 100 W until relatively recently. It's much more pleasant to transport and use than any gaming laptop power brick I've come into contact with.

Accessing the motherboard, dealing with port problems

The Framework Laptop 16's motherboard.

Andrew Cunningham

The Framework Laptop 16's motherboard. Andrew Cunningham

Remove a ribbon cable and a whole lot of screws, and you can lift up this flimsy-ish shielding to access the board, battery, and other components.

Andrew Cunningham

Remove a ribbon cable and a whole lot of screws, and you can lift up this flimsy-ish shielding to access the board, battery, and other components. Andrew Cunningham

There's one M.2 2280 slot for full-length SSDs, and a secondary M.2 2230 slot underneath for a secondary SSD.

Andrew Cunningham

There's one M.2 2280 slot for full-length SSDs, and a secondary M.2 2230 slot underneath for a secondary SSD. Andrew Cunningham

Remove a ribbon cable and a whole lot of screws, and you can lift up this flimsy-ish shielding to access the board, battery, and other components. Andrew Cunningham

There's one M.2 2280 slot for full-length SSDs, and a secondary M.2 2230 slot underneath for a secondary SSD. Andrew Cunningham

Once you remove the keyboard, trackpad, and everything else from the top of the Framework Laptop 16, you'll see its system board, which looks quite a bit like an upsized version of the one in the Framework Laptop 13. Two RAM slots, capable of accepting up to DDR5-5600 SODIMMs, are easily accessible.

And the laptop features a pair of internal M.2 storage slots, up from one in the Framework Laptop 16. The downside is that one, located underneath the main M.2 2280 slot, is a 30-mm-long 2230 slot like the ones we've seen in Surface devices, the Steam Deck, and some other recent laptops. The good news is that a lot of SSD manufacturers are beginning to sell these kinds of drives to end users, making it a lot easier to buy them than it used to be (there was a time not so many years ago when buying a warranty-less OEM drive from eBay was pretty much the only way to do it). But prices will be a little higher, and your capacity and selection will be a little smaller; other workstation laptops in this size category have made room for a pair of 2280 SSDs, which is what we'd prefer to see in an ideal world.

On that note, actually getting inside the laptop to perform these repairs is more effort-intensive than on the Laptop 13; you need to remove all keyboard and trackpad modules, disconnect a ribbon cable, unscrew a series of 16 captive screws, and lift a flimsy-feeling metal shield before you can actually access the RAM, SSDs, battery, and other components. Not difficult, and even Framework die-hards aren’t going to be opening their systems up all the time, but again, it feels like a small step in the direction of complexity and away from “anyone can do this!” simplicity.

The Framework Laptop 16 works with the same expansion ports as the smaller version.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Framework Laptop 16's signature design innovation remains its Expansion Card system, a series of recessed USB-C ports (six on the Laptop 16, up from four in the Laptop 13) that can be swapped out and rearranged to your liking at any time. Don't usually need an HDMI port but run into one at work? Swap one of your USB ports for an HDMI port. Need three DisplayPorts on the same laptop? You can do that, too.

This is where the problems with the Framework Laptop 16 begin. In the Intel versions of the Framework Laptop 13, all these ports were exactly the same, so you really could arrange your ports any way you wanted. The AMD Ryzen version came with additional restrictions, presumably because of limitations related to AMD's USB controller and/or chipset—not all ports support the maximum 40Gbps speeds of USB 4, not all ports supported display outputs, and some ports would draw more power if you used them with a USB-A Expansion Card.

The Framework 16's port map.

Credit: Framework

Those problems are compounded for the Laptop 16, which includes six ports that all have a mix of capabilities and limitations. In fact, there is no individual port on the Framework Laptop 16 that supports every single feature of USB-C.

To recap:

• Only two ports support full 40Gbps USB 4 speeds; the others support 10Gbps USB 3.2.
• Only four ports support 240 W charging via USB-C.
• Only three ports support display output. You also get an additional USB-C port on the back of the dedicated graphics module, but that one won't charge the laptop.
• Two ports have higher power consumption when used with a USB-A expansion card.
• There's no dedicated headphone jack on the Framework Laptop 16, so you'll need to take up one of your ports with an Audio card if you want one.

All of that said, practically speaking, I could get every single port I needed on the Framework Laptop 16. But I needed to be careful which expansion slot I used for which port so I wouldn't end up with a non-functional video output or reduced battery life. It's AMD's limitation, but unfortunately, it has the effect of making Framework's innovative port system feel a bit less effortless and magical than it originally did.

I'm also just not as sure that a large laptop needs interchangeable ports like this, at least not as much as the Framework Laptop 13 needed them. When you only have room for a few ports, the specific kinds of ports you pick (and being able to change them on a whim) can determine what laptop you ultimately buy, or at least strongly influence your decision.

But a laptop like this has room for lots of ports—I don't have the same anxiety about not having enough of them, or the exact kinds that I want, on something like a ThinkPad P1 workstation or a Razer Blade 15. Combined with the fussy nature of the Laptop 16's port arrangement, I'm just less convinced that this kind of system is necessary in a large laptop, though it is still nice to have. Unfortunately, Framework is sort of at AMD's mercy here.

Performance

If the downside of going with AMD in the Framework Laptop is port trouble, the upside is CPU performance and integrated graphics performance, which is quite good (if not record-breaking in this price range or size category). Both the Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS are 8-core, 16-thread processors based on the Zen 4 architecture and packing a Radeon 780M GPU with 12 RDNA3 graphics cores.

This is the best CPU performance you can get from AMD without stepping up to its 12- or 16-core HX-series processors, which, like Intel's highest-end laptop chips, are just desktop silicon repackaged for laptop use. That comes with accordingly higher power use (55 W, up from the HS chips' 45 W), and much weaker integrated GPUs (typically, CPUs this fast are destined for gaming laptops or workstations that would never ship without a separate dedicated GPU).

The HS chips are essentially the same silicon as the 7840U from the Ryzen version of the Framework Laptop 13, just with a higher default power limit (45 W, up from 28 W) so the cores can run faster for longer.

Ultimately, I think Framework made the right choice here, opting to keep performance well-balanced regardless of whether you have a GPU module installed or not. And when you do have a GPU installed, a modern 8-core CPU shouldn't bottleneck things—even a couple of years from now, if you keep the CPU the same but hop to a more powerful graphics module.

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The Ryzen 9 7940HS does a good job running ahead of the 7840U in the smaller Framework Laptop—the 7840HS version should also be faster, but not by quite as much. The Laptop 16 does, of course, fall well short of laptops that fit in 12- or 16-core processors, but a lot of those systems are even larger and heavier than the Laptop 16.

We won't spend much time re-testing the Radeon 780M integrated GPU, which generally performs pretty similarly to the same GPU in the Framework Laptop 13, the Razer Blade 14, and other laptops it shows up in. The dedicated GPU is another story.

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Framework has gone with AMD's mobile Radeon RX 7700S. This is the exact silicon found in the midrange desktop RX 7600 GPU, with the same 32 compute units and the same 8GB of memory attached via the same 128-bit memory bus. The power limit is lower because it's in a laptop, but it still manages to run games about 80 percent as fast as its desktop counterpart.

The choice of an AMD GPU makes this a bit of an outlier among gaming and workstation laptops, which (like the desktop GPU market) tend to heavily favor Nvidia GPUs. Generally speaking, the 7700S is a decent fit for the Laptop 16's screen size and resolution. This is marketed as a 1080p GPU on the desktop, and if you're trying to play games at 2560x1600 and hit the display panel's full 165 Hz refresh rate, you'll be disappointed a lot of the time. But it will do a reasonably good job with most things you throw at it; in addition to all the benchmarks we tried, the Laptop 16 happily hosted a three-hour Baldur's Gate 3 multiplayer session, connected to an external 4K monitor. With slightly lower quality settings and the use of FSR upscaling, I managed to strike a good balance between graphics quality and frame rate.

But it's hard not to think that Nvidia would have been a better fit here, and an Nvidia graphics expansion module is probably going to be near the top of the request list for future versions (the team ought to be familiar with this based on two years of fielding "when is an AMD version coming?" questions about the Framework Laptop 13. Nvidia's power efficiency advantage is the biggest factor here, but the generally superior quality of DLSS upscaling and better ray-tracing performance are also nice perks, and there are plenty of rendering and AI workloads that work better on (or only on) Nvidia's GPUs.

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We haven't tested a ton of mobile GPUs this generation, but the mobile RTX 4070 in the most recent Razer Blade 14 is a decent comparison point. Based on the same silicon as the desktop 4060 Ti, it offers similar performance to the 7700S in non-ray-traced games and much better ray-traced performance in a similar power envelope (bearing in mind that these are power usage numbers reported by software, which aren't always precisely accurate when comparing different GPU models from different manufacturers).

All of this is to say that the Framework Laptop 16 is quite decent as a gaming laptop if you calibrate your expectations appropriately. But it is a relatively expensive one compared to a similarly specced conventional midrange gaming laptop like this Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 (currently $1,350, compared to about $2,200 for a Framework Laptop 16 with the same amount of RAM and storage installed).

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Obviously, part of what you're paying for is the possibility of upgrading the Framework system to a better GPU in two or three years, when that Lenovo laptop will always use the exact same GPU it shipped with. Another part of what you're paying for is the promise of customizability and sustainability. It just gets harder to make that math work when the cost of the upgradeable laptop plus the upgrade is pretty close to the cost of two regular laptops.

Battery life

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Battery life has always been a bit of a weak point for the Framework concept, and over the years, the company's laptops have ranged from "passable" to "not great, actually."

The Laptop 16 manages to be both; without the external graphics module, the 85 WHr battery manages a little over eight hours in our PCMark 10 battery test. This isn't incredible, especially given the size of this battery, but it's perfectly workable, roughly the length of a standard workday (if you're traveling with the Laptop 16 in the first place).

The battery life with the graphics module installed, even with hybrid graphics enabled, was just over five hours. And this is in a test that doesn't really use a dedicated GPU even when one is present. Other laptops with dedicated GPUs we've tested over the years have not been this affected by them in a general-productivity battery test; even a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5 from a couple of years back does better, and it's equipped with a power-sucking 4K display.

So if you're traveling, maybe leave the GPU module at home or pack it separately. Between the size, the weight, and the hit to battery life, the best thing about its modularity right now is that you don't have to live with all of its downsides all of the time.

Scattered thoughts

The Framework logo on the smaller, GPU-less version of the expansion bay module.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Framework Laptop 16 is the sum of a whole bunch of modular parts, which I will also try to embrace for this review. In that spirit, here are a bunch of other miscellaneous disjointed thoughts based on spending two weeks with this thing:

Keyboard and trackpad and spacers

Aside from the web-based controls for RGB and macros, which I already mentioned, as an actual keyboard, I think the one on the Laptop 16 feels nice. It's a standard chiclet thing, and aside from some early trouble hitting the Enter key every time I went to type an apostrophe (I don't know why this kept happening, but it was near-constant for a few days), I didn't have problems with it. Same deal with the trackpad, which feels accurate and isn't so large that I had problems with palm rejection.

Because it bears mentioning, I'm a center-mounted-keyboard, centered-trackpad, no-numpad person, even on a big laptop. Framework has said that the split of numpad to no-numpad people is always about 50/50 in any given group that they've asked about it, though, so there is a numpad you can put in if you want one.

Framework also sent us the "LED Matrix" spacers, grids of white LEDs that cost $49 each (regular spacers come in multiple colors to match the laptop's customizable bezel and typically run $10 or $15 apiece). These are sort of cool, and my 4-year-old was fascinated by the ability to draw his own pictures or write his own words on them; the configuration app also lets you do some animations and other neat things with them. But they go to sleep pretty quickly, and most of the time, they just sit there not doing anything. I'd call them a neat gimmick, but I'm not sure I'd advise you to spend $100 on a pair of them.

Fan noise

The fan on the GPU module is loud. The fans on all gaming laptops get pretty loud when you're using them, but these hit a specific pitch that is hard to ignore. I recommend some noise-canceling headphones—whenever I took mine off, I was always a bit startled to remember that the laptop was making that much noise.

You can also get the fans to spin up if you're doing a CPU-heavy task for a sustained period, like software video encoding or some other multi-threaded job.

Disappointing speakers, webcam

The speakers on the Framework Laptop 16 are also a real disappointment, given how good speakers can sound in a laptop this size. They don't sound particularly awful—they're fairly typical PC laptop speakers. I guess I've just been spoiled by what there's space for in a 16-inch MacBook Pro or 15-inch MacBook Air.

The webcam is also pretty underwhelming, with a serviceable-but-grainy picture that has a hard time balancing exposure if you're sitting with a window behind you or have any kind of uneven lighting in the room you're in. As with the speakers, none of this is especially out of the ordinary for PC laptops. But there are other machines in this general price range that manage to do a better job.

Unique, but not essential (for now)

I think I came into this review wanting to like the Framework Laptop 16 a bit more than I did.

I remember feeling sort of the same way about the original Framework Laptop, but for different reasons. Then, what I was worried about wasn't the laptop itself (which was generally decent and within spitting distance of a ThinkPad or Dell XPS 13 in most ways) but whether Framework would survive long enough to make good on its promises. Over the last two years, the company has released everything from updated motherboards to redesigned lids, hinges, and speakers for the Framework Laptop 13. Framework has earned some trust, and I am pretty confident that the Framework Laptop 16 will get the same kind of attention.

My issue with the Laptop 16 is more about the design of the computer itself, how it's positioned, and the need it serves—things that are more fundamental and harder to fix.

It's an utterly unique laptop, and it's clear that a ton of care and thoughtfulness went into its design and manufacture. It's doing some really impressive things, including what could (finally) be a viable system for upgradeable laptop GPUs. It performs pretty well. Basic things like the keyboard, trackpad, and screen are all done right, and the elements that aren't as good (like the speakers and webcam) are more peripheral.

But it's pricey when compared spec-for-spec with other laptops. It's pretty huge, particularly with the graphics module installed, but even without a GPU hanging off the back, it's not small. Customizable ports feel less essential in a large laptop, and significant limitations on how you can customize them in the Laptop 16 make the whole concept feel less magical and less flexible than it did in the original Framework Laptop. Battery life is OK at best and pretty bad at worst. There's no 4K screen option (yet?). There's no touchscreen option (yet? though that's still true of the original Framework Laptop). AMD's GPU has a few notable deficiencies compared to similar Nvidia GPUs, which aren't available (yet?).