is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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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; games did run, and didn’t seem to have obvious issues at 1440p and high settings.)
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.
221W from Framework’s new 240W PD 3.1 adapter. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
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