Hi all! I have been experiencing many issues with my framework 16 over these past few months.
I was one of the “early” batches to get the laptop, and brushed some of these issues off. I can no longer justify this however, as it is making playing any games more stress than it is worth.
I have two key issues.
My CPU is almost always at a high temperature with just a browser/discord open (70+ degrees), easily reaching 100 degrees even on simple games.
In many games (Fallout 4, Neverness To Everness, Ark Survival Ascended, etc), the performance is extremely lacking in comparison to benchmarks seen on the internet. Alongside this, in these games I often experience full GPU crashes, the effect varying depending on the driver version I am using. I have tried many different drivers. On some, the entire screen goes completely black and there is no input response. On others, the game closes, and the GPU is disabled until I restart my computer again. I had these same issues on previous installs of windows, and have fully reinstalled windows and all drivers fresh multiple times in attempts to fix this.
Any help would be appreciated, as this 2000£ laptop feels barely usable in the current conditions, being COMPLETELY unusable for some tasks.
iGPU set to gaming mode (auto mode makes no difference)
1 TB NVME C Drive
2 TB NVME D Drive
If any more info is required, please let me know and I will try to provide it! Thank you in advance for any help you wonderful people may be able to offer!
I can absolutely reproduce these crashes for testing purposes if required.
I have since updated from BIOS 3.03 to 4.04, doing a completely fresh install of windows, and using the newest driver package. Thought I don’t believe a newer windows install and drivers would help, as I do remember having some similar issues on Linux too (although that was an unsupported distribution so I put it to that originally).
My CPU consistently sits at a much higher temperature than my RX7700S, however I do not see how this causes the GPU to crash. I can understand performance being lower due to throttling. However, I still get very choppy gameplay with ~60% GPU usage and ~30% CPU usage.
Attached is some info, not screenshotted as I am not logged into this forum on the new install, with idle temps. These seem to be ~15-20 degrees hotter than a Lenovo laptop (AMD with GTX 1650) we have in the house, meaning this is not due to ambient temperature. I have noticed any usage at all seems to heavily spike the integrated GPU temperature too.
If the machine is constantly running hot like this there is a good chance that the liquid metal has managed to pump itself out of place partially.
There is a guide from Framework to change the liquid metal thermal material to PTM which does not have this effect over time like the liquid metal did. A number of users have had similar issues and the change of the thermal material made a big difference.
Not sure if support was sending out replacement pads for those affected but it would be worth contacting support to see if this is still valid or if they have a better approach to diagnose these issues being reported.
The material is not terribly expensive, some have reported replacing the metallic shim along with the material has managed the best sustained temps. Searching the forums should bring up a few long threads where this was being investigated and others posting pics of the steps.
Using the guide and knowledge from this thread, it was not a super horrible experience, especially knowing it’s a path that quite a few have successfully done.
So basically I’d be looking at replacing the LM on my cooler? Seems simple enough, I’ll order some PTM 7950 and follow along with the linked post, hopefully once it arrives and I get through the replacement it should be usable again
