Has battery life been discussed/shared/tested during dev? Do we know how much battery life this laptop will have for every day use? I
I’m also quite curious about this. On the site it says they have a 55Wh battery, so presumably there is only one battery size and that part isn’t upgradable. I’m not too familiar with hardware, is that something that should be upgradable? The fact that there is only one battery size would imply that battery life is very dependent on what you install, with more processing power giving worse battery life. Anyone know how much battery life a typical 55Wh battery would give you? I’d imagine this computer does a little worse than average, since the design isn’t optimized for a particular OS and the customizability might make it harder to make everything super efficient.
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We’re in the process of doing battery life testing. In general, you can expect it to land in the same range as other notebooks that have mid-50Wh batteries, 11th Gen Intel CPUs, DDR4, and similar screen size and resolution. There shouldn’t be a meaningful battery life impact from the design choices we made to improve repair and upgrade, except for the choice to use upgradeable DDR4 instead of soldered down LPDDR4x.
The biggest difference between the advertised battery life numbers for different notebooks is the power profile chosen in the OS, the benchmarks used, and how much the brand decides to pad the numbers.
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Hey are there any battery testing updates?
A side note; is there, or will there be an option in BIOS to change the TDP, eg to 15W?
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We have set three power profiles in Windows. You can choose “Best Battery Life” to limit TDP.
Battery life will depend a lot on the workload, but as one benchmark, we’ve tested MobileMark 2018 at 10.5 hours.
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If I didn’t purchase Windows with my pre-order, will it be possible to somehow get those power profiles into the version I will install or is it limited to pre configured Windows machines
No problem, you will get those same power profiles.
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I like having power profiles, Windows not so much though. Have you tested any of the profiles in the tuned-profiles package on Linux? If those are not as suited as the Windows ones, porting the latter to files usable by tuned-profiles would be really neat!
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We haven’t set up profiles for tuned-profiles, but that is something we can explore (and hopefully folks here can share their own tunings in the meantime)
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I’ll be running Linux on it primarily. I’m sure other folks will be too and we all can report back progress as we go of course!
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Does anyone know of other laptops that have the similar specs of the Framework Laptop to see how their battery life has compared?
I know that expecting M1-levels of battery life is not realistic since that is an ARM device, but it would be cool to see if the framework laptop could last at least more than 3 hours of light gaming or using graphic designing software
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The only ones reasonably comparable I have found were the Acer Spin 5 for the i5 version and the Huawei Matebook X Pro 2021 for the less expensive i7. Although the Acer has a touchscreen (so it should theoretically be a bit worse on battery life), the review I read suggested that 15h of battery life were feasible. 10,5 hours were reported for the Huawei (different reviewer and higher resolution screen, so not a perfect comparison to the Acer or the Framework). I guess the “true”/average battery life for the Framework is somewhere between those two numbers, although of course heavily dependant on your usage and power profile.
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@Nick_Martin and @Jason_Hottelet
For Linux you have much more control if you wanted to control the power envelope yourself. you can use the sysfs interface for the intel-rapl driver to adjust the power limits:
Eg you can set your PL1 (long term) and PL2 (short term) power limits in uW:
echo 1 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/enabled
#PL1
echo 28000000 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/constraint_0_power_limit_uw
#PL2
echo 64000000 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/constraint_1_power_limit_uw
From what I have found there is not a good way for the major window managers to control power profiles that are built into gnome/kde/etc. But it would be interesting to explore more.
You can read about the interface here, it is pretty cool because you can also use this to monitor power usage too:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/powercap/powercap.html
There are a few mentions of intel projects for linux.
https://01.org/linux-thermal-daemon/documentation/introduction-thermal-daemon
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Oh WOW! This was an interesting find. My 6 years old Intel ThinkPad has this as well. Works like a charm. I can see this being useful if you know you’re not gonna use the laptop for heavy workload (ensuring any runaway apps don’t kill your battery).
So i noticed nobody has answered the main question yet. How many hours do you get out of the battery?
As noted multiple times above, it’ll depend entirely on how you set up your power profile(s). However, to cut to the chase, most of the early reviewers seem to be getting 7-8 hours using the stock settings with no tweaking.
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Since batch 1 has already shipped a while ago, I assume a lot of people already had time to play around with the laptop. I am wondering, what actual battery life performance are people getting using linux? Ars technica reported good performance in their tests, but I’ve seen a small number of people mention really poor battery life performance in the forums. What are other people’s experiences?
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with kernel 4.18.0-305.10.2.el8_4.x86_64 from rocky linux, I got just under 2.5h last night while watching netflix. It was sitting on a blanket w/ temps between 50 and 70C. @nrp mentioned toying with tuned, so I took a look. by default its in max-throughput mode, so I’ll give max-powersaver a try sometime and report again.
Here’s what tuned says this morning.
11:04:52> tuned-adm list
Available profiles:
- accelerator-performance - Throughput performance based tuning with disabled higher latency STOP states
- balanced - General non-specialized tuned profile
- desktop - Optimize for the desktop use-case
- hpc-compute - Optimize for HPC compute workloads
- intel-sst - Configure for Intel Speed Select Base Frequency
- latency-performance - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased power consumption
- network-latency - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased power consumption, focused on low latency network performance
- network-throughput - Optimize for streaming network throughput, generally only necessary on older CPUs or 40G+ networks
- optimize-serial-console - Optimize for serial console use.
- powersave - Optimize for low power consumption
- throughput-performance - Broadly applicable tuning that provides excellent performance across a variety of common server workloads
- virtual-guest - Optimize for running inside a virtual guest
- virtual-host - Optimize for running KVM guests
Current active profile: throughput-performance
Here’s sensors from last night. (on battery, on a blanket, load: netflix)
iwlwifi_1-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +36.0°C
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +59.8°C (crit = +210.0°C)
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0: +71.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +71.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +52.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2: +56.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3: +52.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
But yea, to answer your question@Oskars_Cizevskis, It got about 2.5h.
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Anyone have any comments on real-life battery life under Windows?
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