Framework, the American company pioneering modular laptops, has finally achieved “the holy grail for gamers” – an upgradeable GPU expansion card.
The Framework Laptop 16 supports the AMD Radeon RX 7700S (2nd Gen), a refreshed version of the optional model available when the laptop launched in 2024, and a mobile version of the RTX 5070 from Nvidia. Swapping them out is almost as simple as swapping between game cartridges from back in the day.
This is a big deal for a few reasons. For starters, Framework is the first company to successfully do this, and second, it means you won’t have to buy a whole new laptop every year if you’re trying to stay up-to-date with the latest tech.
Setting up the Framework of the future
There are a few catches, of course. The biggest one for South Africans is that Framework doesn’t ship to SA yet. There are workarounds to solve that, but you may not want them when you see the price. Preorders for the Framework Laptop 16 start at $1,500 (~R26,600), and that’s just for the basic laptop bits, like the case, display, keyboard, trackpad, and the entry-level Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU. If you want to add RAM, storage, and a GPU, they’ll cost extra.
But the upside of a large initial sum for a modular laptop like this is saving down the road. If you need more power later, or a single component breaks outside of warranty, you won’t have to replace the entire thing.
You’ve got to really want one, though. As novel as the prospect of upgrading or replacing modules in your laptop every year is, you’re paying more money for less performance than a desktop counterpart. That’s true for every mobile GPU, but it can still be a hard pill to swallow.
Still, we can’t help but look forward to this, or something like this, landing on South African shores in the future. It’s not cheap initially, but it could work out cheaper in the long run. Especially if you’re the type that holds onto your tech until it falls apart.
