DIY Framework Laptop - Windows - initial thoughts

I just got my laptop today. I just wanted to come on here quickly and say that I am completely impressed with the laptop. It feels super solid and well built! I installed Windows 10 Pro on it with zero problems. The bundled drivers package is a nice feature that I wish other manufacturers would make.

I actually disabled Intel’s turbo boost and installed some thermal monitoring software (HWINFO) on it, and even though I have been installing and configuring it for the last 4 hours, the highest temperature noted was 57 C. So disabling turbo boost is a great way to help mitigate heat on Windows. Of course whenever I have a workload that could use some burst speed and it is important, then I will enable it again real quick. However like this I am confident thermals will never be an issue for me.

My initial thoughts are simply that I love it.

I have a 250gb ssd module plugged into it that will be getting Ubuntu installed on it as well. But I always start with Windows as I develop for the platform.

My thanks go out to the Framework team for the great job they’ve done. I look forward to a long and excellent relationship!

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If you don’t mind checking, what %/hr battery drain when sleeping do you get on Windows?

Sure, I’ll check for you.

Edit: So on Windows it seems to be a hybrid sleep. In that it will wake instantly at the first stage, and then will hibernate after that. The thing that IS VERY impressive to me is how fast it resume from hibernation. I have 64gb RAM and normally hibernation takes a snapshot of the entire RAM (unless they’ve improved that), and that not withstanding, I resume after the BIOS posts in like 4 seconds. That is crazy fast.

So all this to say, I’m not sure I can give you the numbers you are looking for. I’ll keep making some observations though and respond back here if I come up with anything.

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Seems the Realtek driver is plaguing my ability to properly sleep as well. I have since uninstalled it, and remain confident that Framework will find a solution. As someone who writes software I know how difficult it can be.

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I have a DIY I put together for my partner that we’ve had for about a week. Core i5, 16GB DDR4-3200, Samsung 950 Evo, running Windows 10 Edu.
With Hibernation enabled (the default), battery drain is minimal on ours. It used about 5% battery, and then went into hibernation and stayed there.

When I originally set it up I had disabled hibernation, but then it would drain the battery over night. I hadn’t really checked out the S states the system supports and didn’t realize it seems to be designed to just use S0 then hibernate.

We left Chrome signed in to her department’s email and Gmail, and Word running but nothing explicitly audio-based. I’ll see if she will set up Spotify on it and leave it running when she puts it to sleep and see what happens. I installed the driver bundle so we’re still using the RealTek driver at the moment.

Basically the way to tell if the realtek drivers are causing an issue from a non-technical method is to use the laptop and get the components warm. It will be warm from underneath the device. Then close the lid and let is enter standby. Because the audio driver prevents the computer from entering deep S0 sleep, it will stay warm, and not cool down, until it enters hibernation. Where as normally when sleeping the heat will dissipate and it will be noticeably cooler or even cold depending on how long you let pass, and this is before hibernation is used. This is how it should work.

You will also notice that under the default modern standby the computer will have hibernated much quicker. You will have to turn the laptop back on to resume use. Where as had standby entered deep sleep it would have taken much longer for the 5% battery life to have been reached.

The great thing in general is that hibernation resume is super fast.

With the generic Microsoft provided Realtek drivers I’ve been getting very good modern standby use and excellent battery life during standby times.