Just like the other Ryzen Framework laptops (both 13 and 16), do not support all four USB-C ports of the Ryzen AI board all the same options, so you want to arrange your gates carefully.
The recommendations of Framework for configuring the expansion modules of the Ryzen AI laptop.
Credit: Framework
Framework publishes an image to show you which gates do what; If you look at the laptop from the front, gates 1 and 3 are at the back and ports 2 and 4 are forward. In general, ports 1 and 3 are the “better”, which support full USB4 speeds instead of USB 3.2 and DisplayPort 2.0 instead of 1.4. But USB-A modules must go in ports 2 or 4 because they will use extra power in bays 1 and 3. All four support the output of the display, which is not the case for the Ryzen 7040 Framework Board and all four continue to support USB-C packages.
The situation has Improved the 7040 version of the Framework Board, where not all gates could do any form of display output. But it still complicates somewhat the adaptability story of the laptop compared to the Intel versions, where an expansion card can go to any port.
The Ryzen AI board uses a modified cooling body design with one large heat pipe instead of two smaller and a cooling body that extends to more motherboard components.
Andrew Cunningham
The Ryzen AI board uses a modified cooling body design with one large heat pipe instead of two smaller and a cooling body that extends to more motherboard components.
Andrew Cunningham
The old heatsink design in the Ryzen 7040 version of the laptop, for reference.
Andrew Cunningham
The old heatsink design in the Ryzen 7040 version of the laptop, for reference.
Andrew Cunningham
The Ryzen AI board uses a modified cooling body design with one large heat pipe instead of two smaller and a cooling body that extends to more motherboard components.
Andrew Cunningham
The old heatsink design in the Ryzen 7040 version of the laptop, for reference.
Andrew Cunningham
I will also say that this iteration of the framework laptop has not been perfectly stable for me. The problems are intermittent but persistent, despite the use of the latest BIOS version (3.03 from this writing) and steering package available at Framework. I had a few total system freezing/crashes, incidental problems woke up from sleep and sporadic rendering glitches in Microsoft Edge. These were no problems I had with the other Ryzen Ai -Laptops that I used so far or with the Ryzen 7040 version of the Framework 13. They also remained over two separate clean installations from Windows.
It is possible/likely that a combination of firmware and driver can iron these problems, and they can generally Did not prevent me from using the laptop as I wanted to use it, but I thought it was worth mentioning, because my experience with new framework plates was usually a little better than this.
