The included charger is 180W, which most standard power usb-c power supplies don’t go up to.
Does using a lower wattage charger have any negative effect on the laptop, or potentially damage it? Or does it just cause it to charge slower.
Is 140W good enough?
60W is okay, but it’ll lead to lower performance if you use a dGPU
No risk, at all, of damage.
Is it lower than what the performance would be if it was just using the battery?
The battery is less powerful than the charger, so the performance will be lowered on battery or a low wattage charger
You wouldn’t damage it. You’d either run at a lower performance level to draw less power, or you’d drain the battery faster than it can charge.
Hi,
The need for the 180W charger is to cover the various use cases.
When the battery is charging, it can use 80W to charge, leaving 100W for the CPU, RAM, display and USB ports.
If you have 140W, it still needs the same power for RAM, display and USB ports, so it will throttle the CPU to cope.
When the battery is not charging, 140W should be ok.
If you have a dGPU, then a 180W is about the minimum if you wish to have good performance.
Another thing to consider are peaks. The CPU can draw very high peaks for very short times, and it is good to have a large power adapter to cope, as otherwise the CPU might brown out, resulting in cpu hangs or unexpected reboots.
I’ve charged my FW 16’s battery on a 45W charger before while using it lightly (text editing, web browsing w/o video, etc.).
So yeah, no harm.
I’ve mostly been using an old 60W Lenovo charger and it’s been fine for word processing, web browsing and YouTube with the battery recovering from very low to full over a few hours with no noticeable hit on performance in these functions.
Is the slower charging beneficial for the battery’s longevity?
Slow charging produces less heat, and heat is destructive to the battery’s chemical infrastructure. So, yes, it can be beneficial to the longevity of the battery. Having been using “fast charging” on devices for years now though, I can say I’m not sure it’s a “huge” difference.
For what it is worth, I have the FW16 with the 7700 dGPU and I have never been able to pump more than about 100W in, regardless of charger, regardless of how hard I push the laptop. Thermals ultimately cap the draw at about 100W total. Even plugged into my 240W PS with a 240W cable with a near dead battery and full CPU and GPU benchmarks running and I got it to pull 110W for about 20s before it fell below 100W flowing in and stayed there.
90% of the time, I’m plugged into a 65W PS and, so long as I’m not pushing everything 100%, I get full performance and 20+W into the battery. I wouldn’t bother with a charger below 40W unless the laptop is off and only charging the battery.
How are you measuring power draw, with an external power meter? This is definitely not normal. My FW 16 can sustain >200W through the 240W charger when under load (e.g. playing BF6).
As a side note, I also once used a 9W phone charger with my Framework 16 to prevent battery drain while web browsing. Under light load, by device can sip as low as ~6W if I’m trying to be efficient.
I run linux and I don’t game on my laptop; all loads synthetic or other dev work. I’ve used 2 different power meters and internal linux power stats to confirm. All cores were chugging along just fine and I didn’t see any throttling beyond AMD’s own all-core spec. That said, I haven’t tested this in earnest in about 3 BIOS revisions. (Maybe Windows should just learn to be more power efficient? lol)
I suppose my point was, unless you are doing long power-hungry tasks, most probably don’t need more than 65W charging in most day-to-day use and, to the OP’s Q, there is no harm whatsoever in using less than the 180W charger included.
I just tried my 30W Anker nano, and it drew 24W @ 20V (tested with a usb power meter) cutting the unplugged discharge rate by half. Since unplugged draw is 40-50ish with just web browsing, let me try my 67W one. Yep, that one can maintain at web-browsing levels. Keep in mind I’m connected to my desktop setup so driving several USB devices, two monitors, and currently running my initial Backblaze backup.
It didn’t work with my Anker battery bank, despite it being allegedly 140W. Something about “low voltage stop using” comes on the display. Maybe it can’t figure out charge direction?
EDIT: Apparently, plug it in a few times and eventually the power bank works.