I have a couple of questions about the FW-16 I was hoping to get answered before I order one:
(1) I was reading that the early production FW-16 had a power-drain problem with the expansion modules. Some (or all?) of them would still be “on” and draining the battery even when the laptop was in Sleep or Hibernate mode, and even when fully powered down. This was a significant issue apparently - some owners were reporting that they would power off the laptop on Friday at the end of the work day, and by next Monday morning, the battery would be dead, or nearly so. Has this problem been solved ? I don’t want to have to remove all of the expansion models every time I am finished with the laptop and am ready to unplug it and put it away.
(2) The RGB Macropad: I notice that the keys aren’t labeled. How do you know what each key does? I think you can program them to do whatever you want, like defining hot keys in, say, Excel or Word, and they can be backlit with colored LED lights,but what then? Without labels, like the NumPad has, do you have to just memorize what the keys do?
(3) Populating both M.2 slots with SSD’s: Has anyone noticed any problems with excessive heating? Laptops are generally too thin to mount a heatsink on the SSD’s, so I was just wondering, since the two SSD’s are stacked one on top of the other, how do they get enough air flow to keep from overheating? The CPU has dedicated heat pipes and fans, but not the DRAM memory sticks or the SSD cards. I have to assume that the design engineers have looked at this issue, but it would ease my mind before I drop $2K on this machine to know for sure that cooling is adequate.
iirc that is what the hdmi gen 3 and displayport gen 2 expansion cards fixed…
you know what each key does from memory… as someone who uses the blank keyboard, its really not as difficult as you think it is
It can get enough airflow. Pretty much no laptops cool their SSD’s, and although ssd heatsinks are a big thing on desktop they don’t really help actual real world use other than looking cool in my experience. M.2 gen 5 drives apparently get pretty hot but no framework laptop supports them, and the performance increase in 99.99% of tasks is negligible
I’ve got burnt from touching an M.2 Gen 3 SSD without a heat sink when running CrystalDisk mark benchmark about 5 years ago. I know that Puget Systems in Auburn, WA would glue heat sinks onto the Samsung 860 EVO’s on motherboards that didn’t have a heat spreader that came down over the top of the slot provided with the motherboard. However, most modern SSD’s that I see today that require active cooling come with it preinstalled like this below and if your motherboard has a heat sink latch that comes down over the top you just remove it and use the retaining screw instead.
yeah, but we are talking about real-world performance, not crystaldiskmark
also hot enough to burn you is not necessarily too hot, performance only begins to degrade starting at 70c
For the SSDs, iirc, there is a thermal pad that bridges the 2230 to the bottom of the case and a thermal pad that the bridges the 2280 to the mid frame plate. The 2280’s is really thin width-wise so I put in a second one next to it for full contact.
As others have said, power drain has been fixed for hdmi and displayport card. But the Framework Laptop 16 has two locations where you do not want to leave USB-A modules. It’s shown here:
USB-A modules are not an issue in any other location. Iirc this is a limitation in the internal USB hub chips which are currently available for AMD processors & it was just unavoidable for Framework.
Yes, I’ve seen that diagram: It’s recommended to not use the USB-A cards in Ports 1 and 4, the two that are closest to the rear of the machine. As the diagram shows, those two ports, plus Ports 2 and 5, can handle the most power, and are therefore recommended for USB-C cards for plugging in the charger. Thanks for the reply about the Macropad. One of the coolest things about the FW-16 is that you can swap between the Numpad and the RGB Macropad (or just spacers) so quickly and easily.
the 2230 have a thermal pad to sink to the bottom chassis, and the 2280 might be close enough to the top/mid plate to sink heat into that. Or sink into the 2230.
It definitely gets warm, and that’s without me using super-hot SSDs (dual SN 530). If you are the type that want to shove 10TB of Sabrent Rocket in there, don’t. At least not without making a 5-layer SSD-thermal pad sandwich (pad, 2230, pad, 2280, pad). Even then, don’t.
You’d say that. Depend on what you do, they absoltuely get hot. Also remember that the controllers, especially on fast ones, they dont really sleep properly.
The consumer SSDs in my desktop go to 70 degrees C if I don’t have airflow over them
