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.
I also have used my Anker Nano to charge my laptop (I was doing it to get a few more minutes of game time on flights). I eventually got a (200W) 140W max output Anker battery bank, but there were some models that had issues with the FW16 that I saw people on the forums discussing. I used that information to avoid purchasing one that would have problems.
I’m surprised @TechPriestNhyk was able to get it running off a 9W charger. Mine wouldn’t charge off a 10W or 15W charger while on. (Might be due to a modification he mentioned in another post.)
It looks like I need to ammend my statement. I went and retested my “9W” (which turned out to actually be a 15W) charger and both of my 45W chargers. It looks like they’re not working anymore. I’m not sure if that’s because of changes in the BIOS/PD EC, but I’ve definitely used them in the past.
I haven’t had any luck with chargers that have only a USB-A port even while the FW16 is shut down. Not that I’ve tried many. Usually just the USB ports you’ll find built into outlets or inside furniture (couches, chairs, side tables, ect.). I like to try them to see if I can get away with not having to bring my charger with me upstairs. Although I could see a 15W charger put out more than the ones built into furniture (they are designed for phones after all). I can also see that the updates FW has made could have changed what it allowed.
If I’m recalling correctly, charging from USB-A ports is not supposed to work(?) As I believe they said USB-PD (Power Delivery) is required, and USB-A can’t do PD, lacks the CC pin used for PD communication. I think I read Nrp say Frameworks are supposed to accept down to 5 volts. So really low wattage changers at least have the potential to work, provided they are PD USB-C.
That’s my understanding as well.
For clarification, the low-wattage chargers I cited earlier are type-c PD chargers.
My 18W charger (Google G1000-US 5V 3A / 9V 2A from an old Pixel 3) can almost keep my laptop (7840HS + 7700S dGPU) from draining while watching a full screen YouTube video. With even a slightly lighter load, it will slowly charge the laptop.
As of around the v4 BIOSes, the laptop sometimes seems to have more trouble recognizing this power supply, occasionally blinking the charging light for something like a quarter second each second for 5-30 seconds after plugging in before it stays lit.
Also, I have regularly hit the 0.55GHz bug since around BIOS 3.05 or so, but that bug already has it’s own thread, and this isn’t the only unofficial charger that I use. The others I connect to include 60W from an ASUS monitor, an old 120W hp laptop supply, and the official 180W Framework supply.