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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 26th, 2023

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  • Elevated Systems did a comparison of gaming on the FW13 natively, docked, and with an eGPU. Short answer: you can game on it, but this is not a gaming laptop, and shouldn’t be treated as one. For starters, the 60 Hz display will cause ghosting if you’re pushing high frame rates (though you still have the option of playing docked to an external gaming monitor). You can get decent performance on some games with the graphics dialed down, but the fan will spin up like crazy for demanding titles.

    If gaming is important to you, the 7840U has 50% more GPU compute units compared to the 7640U - and while performance doesn’t scale linearly, that does represent a pretty significant difference.



  • Since upgrading from Tiger Lake to the AMD 7640U, my two biggest gripes (loud fan and short battery life) have been resolved to my satisfaction. That leaves only the more minor issues:

    1. Speakers are not great. Generally not an issue since I’m usually on headphones (thank you, FW, for including the 3.5 mm headphone jack!), but when I do use the speakers, they often sound pretty muffled.
    2. After two years, I have still not gotten used to using the Function keys in order to page up/page down. A six-key layout for the arrows would have been far superior.
    3. Trackpad button click is still unreliable. Yes, you can tap the trackpad for the same effect, but that feels unintuitive to me and I would still greatly prefer physical mouse buttons that I can feel.


  • Don’t overthink it. In your situation, I would upgrade to a new Mac Pro because:

    1. You’re using it in a professional capacity
    2. You can buy one off the shelf immediately.
    3. It’s really tough to beat a Mac Pro for video editing.

    The Framework 16 is a really exciting product, but it’s not going to be available for several months yet, and there will inevitably be some early adopter penalties. Buy one later as a personal machine, exactly as you planned, and then tinker with it to your heart’s content. There are some really exciting things coming from AMD in the mobile space, so you’ll probably have access to an even better machine when the time comes.