Although this may be variable, based on a variety of factors, what is that estimated battery life put forth by Framework for the 16"? Thanks!
As per the spec sheet :
85Wh
80% capacity at 1000 cycles
No estimated times have been disclosed as yet.
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We don’t really know how efficient the laptop is. But battery life was never frameworks strong suit.
My personal (completely unfounded estimates) are:
very light load (video watching, a bit of web surfing): ~8h
medium load (using some more demanding programs, compiling, etc.) 5h
heavy load : 1.5h
I think I’m slightly optimistic though.
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Assuming the draw is similar to my Razer Blade 15 (~10W) under light load I’m estimating it’ll last about 8.5hrs. I’m hoping that my software optimizations can bring it closer to the draw of my thinkpad, which is ~4W, yielding 21hrs.
I think your estimates are realistic.
Assuming there’s no dGPU in use.
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That would be great
I’ve created a graph showing what I believe to be the range of realistic battery life. The power draw will be affected by both hardware and driver optimizations, as well as the software running on the machine. For instance, my Razer Blade 15 will draw 10-15W on windows, but draw 7W on a custom and optimized install of Linux. I start the graph at 4W because that’s what my Thinkpad T470 draws with my optimized linux install, and it’s difficult to get lower than that. Technically I’ve seen it drop to 2.6W, but it’s not very useful in that state.
This graph tells me that without a dGPU and assuming an avg draw between 8 and 15W, we could expect the max battery life to be about 6-12 hours.
I don’t know how much the dGPU draws on idle, but one comment on reddit suggests 8W for a different and more powerful card. This is significantly lower than the idle 15-25W the RTX 3070 in my Razer Blade 15 draws… but that’s not surprising given the nvidia → amd differences. With this 8W assumption, that same battery life estimate drops to 4-5hrs. Ideally the dGPU is off when it’s not in use, and draws 0W, however this has never been my experience.
As you can see, there is a wide range for how long we can expect the Framework 16 to last. Likely between 4 and 21 hours. Where the FW 16 falls on this graph will depend entirely on:
- Hardware optimizations
- Driver optimizations
- The software running
- Use case
For instance, the exact same OS install/SSD on my razer laptop vs thinkpad can draw either 4W or 7W. In this case, I believe a lot of that difference comes from the display technology in use, as the razer blade 15 display draws a fixed 3W even with brightness at 0% and the thinkpad does not.
The FW 13 seems to draw about 13W at idle according to this post: [RESPONDED] Extreme power consumption at idle while one user reports getting the FW 13 down to ~3W under extreme low-draw: [RESPONDED] Extreme power consumption at idle - #11 by jmariondev
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Thanks all!
I’ve been still under the impression, that framework doesn’t handle battery life very well. It was one of the biggest weakness of the FW13.
I also think that there is a penalty we are paying for the modularity. All the input modules and expansion modules consume more power than a normal optimized laptop configuration.
If we look at the framework 13 Ryzen. We get ~8.2h on a 61Wh battery (source: Review: Framework Laptop finally gets an AMD Ryzen config—and it’s pretty good | Ars Technica)
If we assume the FW 16 is just a copy of the FW 13 with a bigger battery, we’d get 11.4h. As far as I can tell, the 7840hs is the same silicon as the 7840u, so in light tasks it probably won’t consume that much more power.
But the bigger screen, more expansion modules and input modules will all take a hit on battery life. Optimistically, I’d say 10 - 20%, so we’d land between 10h and 9h of battery life.
I guess my initial guess were a bit pessimistic instead of optimistic 
As a quick clarification, that 10-13W draw in the OP of this thread was abnormal. I generally see between 5-8W as “normal” load on the config I mentioned in my linked post (running a reasonable handful of apps like Firefox, Spotify, VSCode etc.).
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Both of these comments suggest an average draw of ~7W for the FW 13, which is definitely significantly better than the unusual 13W I cited above, which is honestly a little better than I had though it would be given how I’ve heard Framework isn’t great with power efficiency yet. I fear that despite being the same arch, the HS series cpu may draw more power at idle. I’m not sure why this would be yet, but it’s my suspicion. I also suspect that the display will draw more power not just because it’s larger, but also because it’s a high refresh/low latency display, which is what I think makes my Razer display draw a stupid high fixed 3W.
Only time will tell, but I’m personally hopeful that the battery life on the FW 16 will be “acceptable,” but I don’t expect it to be anywhere near the 24-38hrs I can get on my old thinkpad.
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I only every assumed the display to run at 60Hz, everything else is probably not that good for the battery life.
The VRM is probably larger, meaning more components that need to be powered. And they are typically less efficient at lower amps, so with there being more, you lose even more. But Even if you go down to like 80% efficiency at 7 Watts compared to 90% (numbers highly exaggerated), you’d get a change of ~0.5W. But there are probably lots of these small changes accumulating.
I’m hoping, they will tell us about the battery life, that they can achieve right now, in the next week.
I still think 10h would be the best case scenario and my bet is still on 8h even without an dGPU. But I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised
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That’s likely a good headspace to be in.
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My MSI notebook with a 4800H & RX 5600M will go down to about 12-14W when the dGPU is on (e.g. connecting an external display), and will drop down to about 6-9W when the dGPU turns itself off.
It’s not a particularily efficient system either. My wife’s thinkpad goes down to 3-4W on it’s 14" screen, that also has a renoir based cpu.
So I think 8W is a realistic idle draw without using dGPU on FW16. And the dGPU should power itself down to nearly 0W when not in use (PCIe powersupersave mode allows turning the pci bus and what’s connected to it off completely).
So, yeah, ~10hours of battery life is my expectation. On a new battery.
Not amazing, but completely workable for me.
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If any of the numbers you all are mentioning are even close to true I’m going to be super stoked! I’d love to get like 2 or more hours of battery while gaming. My current laptop (a 2017 Razer Blade Pro) gets like an hour. I ened up flying frequently and like to play games during the flight. Would be nice to be able to play a game for the entire time I’m able to have my laptop out.
Gaming is a heavy workload, these estimations are for lighter work like web browsing and text editing. I wouldn’t expect to get anything like that while gaming. I believe the 780M on the ryzen chips can draw up to 15W, which would likely put it somewhere off to the right of the graph I included above.
Since it’s an AMD chip, it may be possible to set a TDP/power draw limit via software, which would then extend battery life at the expense of performance. As seen on the steam deck though, there is a lot of battery to be gained this way while still maintaining acceptable performance.
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Well slightly disappointing to hear that it wouldn’t last that long, but not entirely unexpected. Especially given its not that big of a battery compared to other gaming lapotops. I probably could lower the power draw from the CPU to extend battery life. I attempted to do something similar on my current laptop, but given its Intel and not a K model, I’m very much limited on that. The Nvidia gpu allowed for it to limit games FPS to 30 on battery which kinda helps. This will be my first AMD system for either CPU or GPU. So I’m guessing AMD probably has something similar. At the very least being able to charge via USB-C will allow me to charge on the plane even if it’s just a little.
Actually, if you want the laptop battery to last long, you need to disable all power hungry devices. Means, when on the move, remove all non essential extensions Period.
The external GPU board - not an option. Leave 2 USB-C plugs and one audio plug, the rest remove. On the software side, use the right cpu scheduler to reduce writes to disk and increase buffer sizes. If you don’t use bluetooth, disable it etc. and so on.
This works also under Windows (because if a device isn’t physically there, it can’t draw power).
Having had some NVidia GPU based laptops before, I stopped using these. I had to replace the motherboard pretty much every 1.5 Years which was a pain. GPU ran too too hot and destroyed parts of the motherboard. Ok - this was around 8 years ago, but still.
At least here, I’ll have other options.
- Framework
replaceable GPU unit - Opensource software (drivers). So I’ll see the errors showing up
- If needed, I can fix the code myself!
- I can fine tune the h* out of it
This is all I ever wanted for a laptop. Reason I went for the full Km here.
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It’s 85Whr battery is 20Whr larger than my Razer Blade 15. Only gaming laptop I’m aware of with a larger battery is the MSI Creator 15, but I could also be out of touch.
If gaming on battery is your interest, I’d recommend planning to tune gaming performance on the 780m iGPU. If the steam deck can make it work, maybe this laptop can too.
I finally figured out how to quote! Lol
I didn’t realize the FW16 was 85Whr. That’s not too small compared to other gaming lapotops. The last thing I remember seeing from Framwork about batteries was the new 65Whr which I know was for the FW13. I guess I just thought that would also be used in the FW16. As for large batteries I know there are plenty of newer gaming lapotops with 90+Whr batteries. Some even with a 99Whr battery like the Lenovo - Legion Slim 7i 16" WUXGA Gaming Laptop - Core i7-12700H has a 99.9Whr battery.
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The moment Framework releases a 99Whr battery for the 16, I’m snatching it
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