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Dithered Tree

MY AMD FRAMEWORK 13 UPGRADE EXPERIENCE

Just upgraded my Framework Laptop 13 Mainboard from a Ryzen 7640U to a Ryzen AI HX 370. I run Arch Linux. Here’s my experience:

  • Upgrade was easy, but the cables for my WiFi card wouldn’t snap into place. There’s a plastic thing that I have to put on top of the connector to hold them in place, but it’s a massive pain to connect. Took me over 20 minutes to align and lock the cables into place, but I got it working.

  • The website said the HX 370 mainboard was only compatible with the RZ717 WiFi card, but the RZ717 was out of stock when I bought my mainboard. When the WiFi card was back in stock, they wouldn’t let me buy it without buying another mainboard. This is stupid, and I suspect just an innocent oversight on their part. I had to install my RZ616 to see if that was good enough.

  • On the new mainboard, the AMD RZ616 wifi card’s drivers would disconnect me for hours at a time, essentially rendering my laptop unusable—not good when you’re do coding interviews for a job. I reached out the customer support, they left me on read for about a week, so I just purchased an Intel AX210 non-vPro which works perfectly. That’s what’s great about a company like Framework: if their support is slow or unhelpful, you can fix your problems yourself.

    • I posted about my customer support experience on Reddit, and even though the post didn’t blow up, their support lead reached out to make sure I was taken care of. They really do seem to care—sometimes things just fall through the cracks.
    • Even though their customer support was slow, the initial response was still promising. I probably would have been taken care of, just after a few more weeks.
    • I think they should stop selling the AMD RZ WiFi cards, given their issues. I wish their website just told me to get the Intel AX210 non-vPro when I was buying the laptop.
    • It only took a few days to get the Intel AX210 non-vPro, which was nice. I’d be a much less happy customer if that also took a month.
  • Linux required some tinkering to get working, but ChatGPT was able to guide me through literally everything 1. I was literally dropping in the SSD from the previous mainboard without reinstalling, so I had some issues booting from the boot partition and needed to update /etc/fstab, so not an issue on Framework’s end. Nothing a live USB couldn’t fix.

  • It’s so cool how I don’t need to wait for a screwdriver from Amazon to replace any of the parts. Keep the included screwdriver in your backpack and you’re always good to go.

  • Their documentation is excellent. Related: Take the Road Most Documented

Overall, these shortcomings are to be expected from a small, growing company. The important thing is that there was a documented, non-hacky solution I could find and implement on my own. The actual upgrade was easy, the HX 370 mainboard is fantastic, and everything now works flawlessly.

Overall: 9/10 experience, would buy again.


  1. I could write volumes about how useful ChatGPT is for debugging Linux issues. I generally know what I’m doing, I just don’t know the syntax for most of the commands. AI has read every single Linux question on the internet and is really really useful for identifying problems and suggesting solutions. ↩︎