I do not know much about how USB works but I am not thrilled with the fact that my FW 16 is losing battery when gaming with the 180w charger that framework makes. Over the past few days I have been searching for a 240 watt capable thunderbolt dock, and there just aren’t any. My current plan is to get a 60w dock with a good amount of IO and keep the laptop also plugged in with the 180w adapter at the same time. I see no reason why the laptop wouldn’t be able to charge off both inputs at the same time.
Please warn me if I’m about to light my laptop on fire.
Your laptop will only accept power from one source, it is supposed to choose the highest power source of those available.
I don’t think there are any laptops that can use two sources at the same time. Using power from two different sources is difficult and complicated. And I think it’s more so when the power comes from modern switch mode power supplies.
240w power supplies will come, they’re just not here quite yet. It takes time for chipmakers to design and put into full volume production dedicated chips made for power supplies. And it takes device makers time to start selling products designed around the chips.
In the meantime, you can use power profiles in windows or linux to reduce power usage slightly.
You could turn off boosting or lower some power on the GPU maybe? I don’t have a FW16 but can’t you use Ryzen Master to tune down the power use a bit so that battery isn’t drained while gaming?
Are you playing on performance or balanced power profile? Balanced may not have battery drain. I’m assuming drain is your issue
I know for a fact Dell is doing it. The dock has two magnetically coupled connectors that connect to two adjacent USB-C sockets on the laptop. I’ve got a couple of the Dell WD19DCS docks for use with my FW16, but can use only one of the connectors because the combining functionality is proprietary.
That uses a single power adapter. Rather than two separate power supplies. It’s just using two usb cables to pass it to the laptop. Presumably because the dock & laptops don’t support standard USB PD 48v / 240w. It seems the WD19DCS dock does 20v @ 5.25A on each USB cable (violating the USB-C current limit a bit) in order to get 210W without USB PD EPR 48v. The WD19DCS dock power adapter is labeled 19.5v @ 12.3A. It’s one source, one switch-mode power supply, using two cables doesn’t change it being one source for the laptop’s power system. It doesn’t present the challange of two seperate sources.
You can do it but it requires extra circuitry and just generally introduces a lot of complexity to a point where it’s only done in pretty extreme cases.
In dells case it also only works on 2 specific ports, making it work on any 2 ports on a framework would be even more complex.
The laptop has protections that will prevent it from receiving power from more than one charger at a time. If it didn’t have those protections it would be a fire hazard, but since it does have those it isn’t a fire hazard.
A couple years ago Asus offered a laptop that advertised that it could “be charged through power (DC) input port and Type-C port simultaneously”.
The problem was that those laptops had a tendency to sometimes fry part of the mainboard when multiple chargers were connected and Asus removed that feature in future years.