2 days ago
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On Tuesday, I told you how the modular computer company Framework was finally fulfilling its promise of the “holy grail for gamers” — a laptop with modular, swappable discrete graphics cards so easy to swap, practically anyone can do it at home. The first futureproof gaming laptop, perhaps?
Today, I can confirm the system actually works. I traveled to Framework’s San Francisco offices to be the first journalist to upgrade an entire laptop graphics card, with my own hands, in just three minutes — including the time it took to reboot. I yanked an AMD Radeon RX 7700S video card out of the machine and plugged in a brand-new mobile Nvidia RTX 5070, with just six screws and using the pen-shaped screwdriver that comes included with the machine.
And because seeing is believing, I filmed the whole thing to show you how quick and easy it was. (Hey veteran PC builders: this looks easier than MXM modules, right?)
This is the proof point we’ve been waiting for. It’s one thing to build a laptop that can swap its graphics card, and another thing entirely to actually get both Nvidia and AMD to actually deliver upgrades that fit. Alienware built such a system in 2019, the Alienware Area-51m, but a year later it revealed it wouldn’t actually deliver even one graphics card upgrade, got sued, and settled with customers in arbitration.
Framework, too, convinced us in 2023 it had built a viable and clever upgrade system — but it’s actually following through. It got Nvidia’s blessing and support to build an actual upgrade that fits and works in an existing laptop.
I wasn’t able to test everything I would have liked to test at Framework’s offices. We couldn’t run benchmarks, only basic gameplay samples to show the card was working. (Framework claims the Nvidia card should be a 30 to 40 percent upgrade over the existing AMD one.)
Also, I wasn’t able to upgrade quite from scratch. I actually hauled my original Framework Laptop 16 review unit to San Francisco to see if I could turn that one into a new Nvidia laptop, but CEO Nirav Patel told me it would need software updates, including at least one new BIOS version, which weren’t fully ready yet. So while I did do the upgrade myself, the laptop I upgraded was one that Framework had prepped for the GPU swap.
While I was there, I also got to try Framework’s new standards-compliant 240W USB-C PD 3.1 charger, one of the very first on the market, letting the Laptop 16 (the first 240W PD 3.1 laptop!) finally play and charge at full speed. I brought my power meter and saw the Framework Laptop 16 pull over 220W while running stress tests, charging up its battery, and charging up a couple phones plugged into the laptop all at the same time. When I came back 15 or so minutes later, the new power adapter was only warm, not hot — comfortable to pick up and hold. I’ll have a video on that next week.
At $699 for only a 100W, 8GB mobile RTX 5070 worth of performance, this might be a niche product for now. But Framework’s proven the point, and I’m hoping future upgrades keep it from being niche for long.
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