Review: Ryzen AI CPU makes this the fastest the Framework Laptop 13 has ever been

Like the other Ryzen Framework Laptops (both 13 and 16), not all of the Ryzen AI board’s four USB-C ports support all the same capabilities, so you’ll want to arrange your ports carefully.

Framework publishes a graphic to show you which ports do what; if you’re looking at the laptop from the front, ports 1 and 3 are on the back, and ports 2 and 4 are toward the front. Generally, ports 1 and 3 are the “better” ones, supporting full USB4 speeds instead of USB 3.2 and DisplayPort 2.0 instead of 1.4. But USB-A modules should go in ports 2 or 4 because they’ll consume extra power in bays 1 and 3. All four do support display output, though, which isn’t the case for the Ryzen 7040 Framework board, and all four continue to support USB-C charging.

The situation has improved from the 7040 version of the Framework board, where not all of the ports could do any kind of display output. But it still somewhat complicates the laptop’s customizability story relative to the Intel versions, where any expansion card can go into any port.

I will also say that this iteration of the Framework laptop hasn’t been perfectly stable for me. The problems are intermittent but persistent, despite using the latest BIOS version (3.03 as of this writing) and driver package available from Framework. I had a couple of total-system freezes/crashes, occasional problems waking from sleep, and sporadic rendering glitches in Microsoft Edge. These weren’t problems I’ve had with the other Ryzen AI laptops I’ve used so far or with the Ryzen 7040 version of the Framework 13. They also persisted across two separate clean installs of Windows.

It’s possible/probable that some combination of firmware and driver updates can iron out these problems, and they generally didn’t prevent me from using the laptop the way I wanted to use it, but I thought it was worth mentioning since my experience with new Framework boards has usually been a bit better than this.