If you are experiencing this issue (400mhz, 0.39ghz cpu clock) while charging the battery above around 50+% and want an early test build based on 3.06 that has a fix, DM me on the forum and I can provide a link to download. Otherwise we will be releasing 3.07 in the next week or so.
Technical reason seems to be related to some component variation around the charging circuit. Internally the charger IC has several control loops that run, including an input current control loop, and a battery charging control loop. Both of these limit current, and the input current loop can also limit the battery charging control loop. At a high state of charge the battery charging control loop can allow the input current to increase to the maximum input current, and trip the prochot over a very short time interval before correcting, (microseconds) due to what I think is control lag. The charger has a setting to debounce this, and we increased the debounce time. Still getting some data on the exactly why this happens, but this sounds like a case where a pole moved to the right hand side of the plane
@Kieran_Levin, just to confirm, will this be installable for users with Linux right away? I think I remember the existing bios updates were only installable from Windows.
So far, it seems to be working for me. I have tested on all 4 expansion ports. Previously, every time I charged with a particular charger and reached ~80%, the CPU throttled to 0.39GHz. Now I seem to notice no performance issues.
“Agreed, would be nice to have the ability to flash it via a bootable media.”
You can use a utility called Rufus and a generic win10 install iso to create a “windows-to-go” install which boots and runs from usb. You don’t need a windows license, it will run well enough and just disables some personalization stuff like setting the desktop wallpaper. It’s annoying and overkill and you shouldn’t need to do that, but it works and you can do it right now for free from public downloads. I installed to the framework 1T usbc module since it’s read/write specs are better than any thumb drive.
Just wanted to give an update on this issue. I installed the new drivers as well as the 3.07 BIOS and I haven’t had any issue anymore. My laptop has been running the best it ever has! Thank you @Kieran_Levin and whoever else from the @Framework team that worked on this!!
Updated to 3.07, still having issues where the clock drops down to 800Mhz and then slowly creeps up again. Disabling BD PROCHOT in ThrottleStop doesn’t help.
posting this here since this thread is the top search result for CPU clock issues: if anyone with a batch 1 machine is still experiencing this symptom even after updating the BIOS to 3.07, consider replacing the thermal paste on the CPU. not only did this fix the clock issue on my machine, but it seems to be running much cooler overall and the fan doesn’t seem to spin up nearly as often (prior to this, i would sometimes hear the fan running at maybe 50% capacity when the computer was mostly idle).
@Kieran_Levin I can confirm that my batch 1 model slows down heavily after a few minutes of usage if and only if “Processor performance boost mode” is enabled:
I got 0 issue if that setting is disabled.
Already did that. It feels much cooler/silent now. But I still got the very agressive downclocking issue described above.
I also have the problem of my device throttling to 400 MHz whilst gaming. I’m playing Far Cry 5 via an eGPU with a GTX 970 and an i7-1165G7 with 16 GB of RAM. All cores regularly throttle to 400 MHz and reduce the TDP to around 5 W. I’m running BIOS 3.10, which sadly didn’t fix the issue.
@Kieran_Levin is there going to be a fix for this? This problem seems to be persisting for a long time. I’m a Batch 8 user so there’s something critically wrong with production.
This is the exact issue I’m having. First framework laptop I had worked fine, but was replaced due to refusing to power on or charge. The second laptop would regularly throttle. I was then shipped a replacement mainboard (laptop #3?), which seemed to fix it for a few days.
The issue still persists, I’ve tried pretty much every reasonable thermal paste, including Thermal Grizzly, Shin-Etsu, and Arctic MX-5.
I really want to keep using my Framework, but this is driving me insane. I’ve emailed another request to support. They’ve been very helpful, but regardless I’m really not hopeful this can actually be fixed.
@cowpod if you turn off the CPU turbo in Windows power settings, the throttling is resolved. You might need to edit the registry to see the option. Sadly the only solution I’ve found.
@preston thank you, even though this isn’t a solution - it completely removes a majority of the CPU performance.
It’s a shame that I’ll have to handicap my processor (not an issue with any other $1000+ laptop) in order to use it normally.
@cowpod I agree. It’s sufficient for me to be able to play Far Cry 5 smoothly so I can live with that. In the end the base clock isn’t that low either. But I’m also looking forward to a fix by Framework. @nrp please look into this.
Actually it is a common behaviour with intel cpus for a quite some time.
The new XPS 13 Plus is dealing with the same issue right now…
Havent had the issue myself though, therefore i have never looked into it and have no idea if it is fixable by the user…
I’m seeing this issue with the new 12th-gen board as well (not sure if anyone else here has the new board), on Linux. For me, it looks like:
Start playing a game
After several hours playing, it suddenly slows to a crawl.
Check CPUs; all are running at 399MHz. Check temperatures; max is around 65C.
Quit game.
Wait 15-20 minutes.
CPUs recover and start working at higher speeds again.
I can go back to playing the game, and it seems fine for at least a few more hours before slowing down again.
I’ve tried rebooting, but that doesn’t solve it. Even the Framework logo boot screen, and the GRUB bootloader screen paints slowly, before Linux is even loaded, so it doesn’t seem to be an OS issue. I feel like a BIOS/firmware update might be necessary to fix this, assuming it’s not a hardware/board design issue. I’ve had the laptop plugged in during all this (charged to 100% or near-100%), and haven’t yet tried unplugging it.
Good to know there is an update. Going to install now.
