The gpu thermal design is also completely replaced when swapping expansion bays
Very true! But I think that re-engineering the whole thermal solution every generation would be… Expensive.
I really want to see a high-end gpu in this machine, but my hopes are low. If I were Framework I’d commit to the design of the physical parts and change the pcb to maximise profit.
Hope they won’t tho 
I think so, too. According to rumors from last year ( https://twitter.com/All_The_Watts/status/1665360849584934912 ) that would include a 7800S (120w) or maybe a 7900S (135w). And then we’ll buy new bags, because we buyed it with the 7700S in mind, while it is very possible, that the expansion bay will grow with bigger chips.
Completely re-engineering everything every generation would be, however I wouldn’t be surprised if they introduced a larger module with capacity for 150w cooling and continue to use that (in parallel with the current 100w module).
Also, the portion of the thermal solution that touches the GPU core die does need minor re-engineering with some generations due to different GPU core dies being different shapes, sizes, and thicknesses. For example Framework engineered a slightly tweaked thermal solution for the AMD Framework 13 motherboards because it makes slightly better contact (and therefore cooling) with the AMD CPUs but worse with the Intel CPUs.
I’m no field expert, but your reasoning is sound to me.
Anyway, no cost is better than any cost, and even small changes to the heatsink module would require manufacturing diversification and/or opening more lines to produce the new variant etc.
I’m excited about a potential 7900S tho, crossing my fingers!
Under that premise I at least hope, they’ll introduce a low power profile with the next gen dGPU module, that needs less than 80W in order to address the two main bad issues with the current dGPU module:
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The power adapter not being able to provide enough power for the whole system under heavy load, resulting in drawing power from the battery even when connected to the power supply unit. Under those circumstances, the battery doesn’t last long if unplugged, resulting in mobile gaming being a far away dream for the FL16 currently.
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The thermal issues resulting in loud fans. Due to more and more of the system management being controlled automagically, undervolting manually seems to have become complicated.
Ideally, a future gen. dGPU for mobile gaming, drawing less power than the 7700S while delivering a better performance would be the best answer to this problem, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be realistic at least for the upcoming few years.
A builtin undervolting feature / low power profile would be one way to address said issues.
At least I’d be willing to accept this tradeoff in performance to address the power and noise issues.
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Buy a laptop for 2.5-3k and then suffocate it? Don’t you think it’s not worth it? The company needs to make a power supply unit for 240w as soon as possible.
I’d rather call it power optimization than suffocation, as most consumer electronics nowadays run more effectively with less than standard power levels, because they’re usually using more power than they’ve been designed for to squeeze the last bit of performance out of them.
There is a growing number of people who prioritize their health and the environment over their laptop’s peak performance. It’s hardly any fun to use any laptop when you’re sick or out of power. You seem to rather suffocate yourself than your laptop, just because of its price tag.
Framework wants to better the environment, so they’ve got to think about noise pollution and power wastage in the long run, too.
I’d run mine at 80W if I could.
I already framerate limit and run at lower resolution to bring noise and thermals down for personal comfort in use.
If I could just set a bios setting to power throttle the GPU to any hard limit I wanted, that lessens my need to manually edit/giggle with game settings, AMD adrenaline and windows to accomplish the same thing.
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At this point, massive expansion bay GPUs should take external power from a second USB-C cable. No way GPUs can just keep getting bigger while USB-C as a standard is still capped to 240W. I honestly cannot conceive of a reason why USB-PD would go beyond 240W.
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The thing is that you probably won’t see either, you’ll hardly see beefy laptop GPUs over the 150W range (180W being very rare) simply due to thermals, is hard or impossible right now to go over that without making very chonk thermal solutions.
Oculink really is the best of all worlds, huh?
I hope some mad engineer out there finds a way to have switchable Oculink with the dGPU. It’d be ridiculous and absolutely overkill but also cool.
I don’t have battery drain issues in balanced mode.
Is it not possible to manually control the fans?
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Why doesn’t the framework allow fans and thermals to be controlled?
On the other hand, are you aware that the noise and heat problem affects all laptops with a dedicated graphics card?
Almost, it does lack hotplug and usb/power side channels but otherwise yeah it is a pretty good solution for a lot of applications.
It does, it just needs a bit more userfirendy front end software for it.
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It does not on Windows… There is currently no known way of tuning fans.
I thought ectool at least kind of worked on windows but I may be wrong.
ectool? Care to explain?
You know the program you use to talk to the embedded controller which among other things can be used to mess with the fans.