Love the Lenovo monitor idea… I don’t like my existing one, and putting the dock in the monitor means one less power cable and box that I have to hang under my desk neatly. That said, the only dock I’ve found better than the Dell at 90W is USB-C Universal DV4K Docking Station with 100W Power Delivery | Targus which will deliver 100W.
I’d want hard evidence that it’ll supply 140W to a non-Lenovo laptop before buying.
There’s nothing I can find on the spec sheet or in the manual that details the power output. Which is poor from Lenovo.
Yeah. That’s true. Lenovo does have some >100W USB-C adapters that are 20V/6.75A for their laptops, and the manual doesn’t give the power output details.
Some other details from the manual:
140W when other USB ports are not “loaded”.
The included USB-C to USB-C cable is rated at 240W.
That does kinda point in the direction the monitor may mean something like that with the very descriptive “up to” 140W
That doesn’t mean much
Assuming it’s a 240W PD2.1 cable that would be an indicator in a good direction
Just want to also chime in…FW16 doesn’t actually require 180W, especially if you don’t have the graphics modules and running flat out. I’d bet 90-100W is more than enough for a heavily loaded no dGPU installed.
If, however, you have a dGPU installed, as per Framework | Framework Laptop 16 Deep Dive - 180W Power Adapter, it does sound like you might need that 180W for sure. So if you don’t plan on having the dGPU installed ever, or at least don’t use it loaded up, you’ll be fine with any of the 90-100W docks.
If you do plan to game/load up the dGPU, that’s a different story. You might just need to compromise and still have 2 wires.
Hmmm…that’s an interesting question, can the Framework pull power off of 2 USB-PD devices plugged into separate ports? I wouldn’t think so, but I wonder.
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Since you also plan on running monitors via the dock: Keep in mind that especially in Linux the AMD driver(s) involved are still a bit of work in progress wrt the various docks’ idiosyncracies with displays over Thunderbolt (or rather USB4). “Plain-er” USB docks seem to fare better overall. So you might want to hold off on getting anything fancy dock-wise until this is resolved. Maybe live with one (or two?) HDMI/DP extension cards for a while?
No chance.
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That’s mostly sorted, though. With the updated bios 3.03 the tb docks started working 
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Some docks for sure, but especially under Linux I think monitor issues are still widespread. See my posts in that thread and others’ too. I still (edit: under BIOS 3.03 and all through the latest Fedora kernel, 6.6.12 as of now) have the issue I described in that thread and the associated bug report upstream.
Yeah there are tons of signs pointing either way.
So, lets say I have the Framework power in one port and a USB C dock in another. Both can deliver power. What happens? Which does it use?
IIRC Framework has stated that it will always choose the highest power source. So if you connect a dock and the Framework 180w brick it will draw power from the 180w brick.
There’s always something “new” on the horizon, but it sounds like USB 4 Version 2 (Ugh, USB-IF’s naming conventions feel soooo bad!) will address most folks concerns. It should provide enough power to support even a well appointed laptop (240W PD at 48V) and brings DP 2.0 Alt Mode. Of course the Framework 16 already supports the new PD standard! But there aren’t really any docks out yet that do. The question would be when we’d see it in AMD silicon. USB 4 has pretty much been missing in action on AMD Desktop silicon (it’s been implemented on external controllers on some Mobos), so maybe we’d see it’s appearance on Ryzen 9000 Desktop this year fully integrated, or otherwise perhaps USB 4 version 2 will debut on the Ryzen 9000 mobile APUs whenever they make their appearance, perhaps 2025 as a upgrade from the current USB 4 implementation.
But as other folks have said, without the dGPU installed, 100W PD will probably be enough for decent charging speeds + laptop operation in high performance mode. Goodway is making a couple of nice stationary USB 4 100W PD docking stations that would satisfy me at least for now, but would have to wait and see if any company on the US side of the pond takes the design from them as ODM and starts selling it over here.
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Almost certainly, at worst you’ll have somewhat slower charging if you absolutely hammer the cpu/igpu.
48V PD is in a bit of a chicken and egg situation, If there are no devices using it there won’t be any peripherals…
That’ll hopefully change relatively soon.
FYI All the docks kind of suck right now. New PD specs have come out, new Thunderbolt Spec around the corner, and DP 2.1 is still rather new.
This will change latter this year or sometime next as people refresh but right now its pretty anemic. I regularly yell at the OEMs my work leverages and even chew out the Intel and AMD account team for this. Single cable docking was nice for a while for a brief window but is back to being a nightmare because of how they didnt execute their refreshes in 2022 like their original plan (they literally couldn’t meet to validate stuff at VESA industry meetings and stuff where they bring equipment and plug in test with each-other’s pre prod units).
Docks that exceed 100 watts today either use:
- Power pass through and support only PD 2.0
- exceed the spec they are built against to allow higher amprages through by using thicker then standard wires (i.e. the Dell). But this means auto negotiation with third party devices is limited.
- use a 2nd cable for supplemental power (i.e. HPI’s Thunderbolt G4 dock) so anything over 100 watt goes over a thicker more robust DC mini jack.
Dell WD19S Docking Station with 180W Power Adapter is good option. I have ordered one but the DHL shipment on hold making me to wait a bit more to have the product in hand. I will let you know when the product will be in my hand
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Did you have the chance to try it?
Realizing that EPR isn’t going to be a thing for docks for a while I went ahead and prioritized getting something that would do Display Port 1.4 to a single display, as my machine isn’t generally going to be my primary machine and I’m not worried about driving more than one external display for now.
So I ordered one of these cable matters hubs and it seems to work great, so far, but I’m all of 30 min into testing. 4k@120hz HDR, 1Gbps link, usb connected devices, and power enough for anything not pushing the dGPU on one cable (power-z says 100w possible).
Here’s another sign I found:
It is certified by the USB Implementers Forum for a Power Delivery Profile of 140w.
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