As a casual user will I notice the difference between the Ryzen 5 vs 7?
I'm planning on getting the framework 13 for writing work, videos calls, and the occasional older video game (hoping to replay the dragon age series). As a casual user should I expect to see the difference between the Ryzen 5 and 7?
Both for your work and gaming Ryzen 5 will be perfectly fine. The 7 has 50% more graphics cores but not necessary for older games. Essentially, in very loose terms, if it's playable on the steam deck, it should work great on on the Ryzen 5.
I would say for your the uses you listed I would get a Ryzen 5. You can upgrade later if you really need to. But I think everything you listed can easily be done on a Ryzen 5. How much ram are you thinking of getting?
Cpu wise, no, nothing on the list would bog down the cpu much. Gpu wise, maybe to some extent, given the ryzen 5 has 4 less CUs than higher end models. It wont stop it from running at playable frame rates, but the higher model would definately run faster.
With the workloads you listed the only place that you may have a noticeable difference is in gaming. But if the games you play are not very intensive then you will only see a negligible improvement
For that use case, the Ryzen 5 seems perfectly suitable. It's what I pre-ordered myself, with a similar expected workload.
the 7640u and 7840u are both rated for a default TDP of 28w, although it is configurable as low as 15w by the laptop manufacturer.
That reference seems to be using the default for the 7840u, whereas they're using the configurable minimum for the 7640u, which is misleading.
The 7840u and 7640u are actually the exact same chip, just the 7640u has 2 CPU cores and 4 GPU cores disabled.
Ryzen is pretty good at putting cores to sleep when they aren't needed, so when at idle or running a load that can't take advantage of those cores the 7840u should behave pretty much the same as a 7640u and have similar power consumption.
Then when under heavy loads both CPUs will likely hit whatever the maximum power the cooler can handle is, however having more cores each running at lower power (ex. 7840u) generally performs better than fewer cores each running at higher power (ex. 7640u).
So under heavy loads the 7840u should actually have better performance with similar power consumption, however the better performance allows it to complete the task quicker and get back to low power idle sooner, overall improving battery life.
So theoretically the 7840u should overall have similar to slightly better battery life than the 7640u assuming all software is implemented properly (I was an early adopter of Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs and it took several driver/BIOS updates before it would reliably put unneeded cores to sleep and significantly reduce idle/low load power consumption).