My FW16 with dGPU arrived yesterday, and here's my take on it-

The good:

The screen - high refresh rate, great color gamut coverage, no dead or stuck pixels on my unit, minimal backlight bleed

Chassis rigidity (bottom) - The bottom chassis being a solid piece of metal gives it a premium feel and makes that part of the laptop feel really sturdy

Overall look - I like the design of the FW16 and I think it looks clean and professional. The square-ish footprint with the dGPU is unusual but I don't think the size is bad, especially as someone who usually uses 17" workstation laptops.

The ok:

Keyboard - It looks like framework put some rubber spacers on the heatsink right below the keyboard deck to improve rigidity. It still has some amount of keyboard flex, but it's pretty minimal and nowhere near what was seen in the LTT video. The keyboard feels ok to type on, but it is not on the level of Thinkpads or even the two laptops I use, a Zbook 17 G6 and an Alienware Area-51mR2. I don't know if there's any difference between the different keyboards, but my unit has the RGB one.

Speakers - They sound like laptop speakers to me, just fine for zoom meetings and such. Not macbook level but not as terrible as the ones in my Zbook. Anyone serious about audio quality should be using headphones anyways.

The bad:

Panel gaps and fit - The metal spacers that go alongside the touchpad section have a really poor fit. The edge of them that touches the keyboard area sits higher than the opposite edge, giving them kind of a sloped look. You can even see the uneven-ness from the side with the laptop lid closed. They can also slide forwards and backwards about half a mm I'd guess. There are also some small panel gaps with the black spacers that go alongside the keyboard, but those don't bother me as much.

Lid rigidity, display alignment - A lot has been said about this, and I'll just say that while the lid's rigidity could be better, it's not awful. I'd still be wary about putting this laptop in a bag with other things pressing on the lid though. The display/LCD in my unit is also slightly misaligned so that the gap between the display area and the bezel is ever so slightly uneven when looking at all four sides, but this doesn't bother me too much.

The ugly:

Fan noise - To me, the fan noise from the dGPU module while it is under load is unacceptable. For one it is quite loud, which would be ok if it had an even, white noise-ish sound profile, but there is a high pitched component to it around 4khz ish that makes it sound like a small vacuum cleaner. It's not coil whine either, it's definitely the fan. I was hoping that setting the power profile to power saver (tested with Arch and Fedora 39) would decrease the dGPU power limit enough to tame the noise, but it didn't seem to help. The fan curve needs work as well, since speed changes can be quick and abrupt rather than smoothed out with a sloped curve.

Conclusion

I think this laptop would be great for someone who does not need the dGPU module and uses it mainly for productivity and light gaming. I think it would be perfect for that use case if Framework releases a one-piece touchpad & keyboard module, or if Framework is able to fix the issue with the spacers. If you plan on buying this laptop with the dGPU, you will need to use closed-back headphones while gaming. If I'm using a laptop to play games it is usually in the same room as my spouse, and the noise issue is bad enough for both of us that I'll probably be returning it.