I completely agree Trevor! I just tried to install Fan Control and as expected it didn’t find a single fan that it could interact with or read the values from which is really odd considering that my desktop computer brings up every single fan in my case including the ones connected to my AIO, CPU and even the two fans on my GPU as separately controllable entities. This open-source utility even found the fans on my old Razerblade Pro laptop and gave me limited control of them.
Perhaps Framework is concerned that if they open up this functionality that people will turn the fans down to avoid the noise and risk reducing the life of the hardware creating potential warranty nightmares for them or the opposite where people overclock things since they can just run the fans at 100% all the time if they want too and that could lead to some extra wear and tear. But, the truth is almost all components in a PC now days have thermal monitoring and either throttle or lock up if they exceed their thermal limits to protect themselves so I don’t believe this would be a problem at the end of the day so long as they didn’t let people disable the upper thermal limits the unit is warrantied under.
I’d love to see someone from Framework jump in here and explain why they don’t want to give control of the fans to the end user because I think it would help a lot of people because I’ve seen quite a few threads where people were willing to trade performance for a quieter experience and this would give them that option. And then you would have people like me that would use super aggressive fan curves to keep things even cooler than normal because we don’t care how loud our laptop is since we’re basically deaf from all the constant noise in our environments that we choose to live in!
C’mon Framework! Give the people some fan control baby! I want to use http://getfancontrol.com on my epic laptop!
I’m in complete agreement. Framework’s primary segment and evangelists are custom PC aficionados. Fan control, along with frequent bios updates*, should be critical to their business strategy. Their support could also use a business analyst writing some published troubleshooting workflows (me? haha) to make the support experience more consistent. 30-50 emails to explain what the user should provide in terms of video evidence of issues is inefficient and angers their evangelists. As a support person, would also be frustrating not to have expectation guide rails.
Summary
They are fixing I hear - I’d expect bios updates at least twice yearly.
Couldn’t agree more @Trevor_Textor! I’d personally like to see a lot more BIOS settings for power users that want to have finer control over their computers but at the same time I can see why Framework might want to limit options to reduce potential for damage to hardware or tech support calls. But, I think they can give a lot more before they run into any issues like that and honestly, they might even reduce some tech support calls if they added some of these features like custom fan curves, etc. When using a laptop, you’re always playing with a tradeoff between performance and longevity so giving the end user more options to customize that experience to their exact liking would be great.
I will say I really like the graphical UEFI on this laptop. It’s very straight forward and makes things like dual booting operating systems super simple and intuitive. But, I think a lot more options could be added for fine tuning things and since the CPU and GPU both have thermal throttling built in that can’t be circumvented without crazy hacks I don’t think they need to worry about warranty issues coming from people using custom fan curves since the worst that will happen is they will lose performance which would be expected if you’re reducing the cooling of your laptop.
Heck, they could even include a little warning that says “By changing these settings you’re accepting that your performance may diminish” or something along those lines just to avoid the support calls from people that don’t understand why their laptop is running so slow when they shut the fans off complete. And we all know they will totally get those calls if they added that feature without warning people.
I will say that I’ve never seen a BIOS quite like the one on this laptop so I’m guessing it’s bespoke and written from the ground up since it’s an open-source project. Or maybe they started from an open-source BIOS out there somewhere. I’m not quite sure but if that is the case I wonder if it would be possible to make custom BIOS for it? I know that would probably void your warranty instantly but after your warranty is expired that might be fun to play around with if nothing more than to demonstrate how flexible the hardware is. I think something like this would be useful for when you give your framework motherboard a second life as a router or media PC with a 3D printed case then you could overclock it and add a ton more cooling to it which isn’t something you can do in the laptop chassis really and I’d imagine she’s already running at the ragged edge of performance given the heat this baby puts out.
I’m just an avid fan and/or “Former Framework Firework” (which is just somewhat of a community medal, not an indication of any former or ongoing relationship with the company). I’ve also got a bunch of other stuff going on… anyway, I digress. Hi!
Truth be told, I have access to EV and WHQL driver signing services through my employer, but I would be loathe to use them on this. Apart from that, the best I have been able to determine is that WHQL will only cross-sign drivers that are already signed–and I do not possess an EV code signing certificate[1]
Alas, it does. Specifically, it needs access to LPC - ports 0x800-0x807 for the 11th-13th gen and ports 0x800-0x8fe and 0xe00-0xeff for the rest. The embedded controller does expose an i2c hid interface but it is already occupied with the rfkill and monitor brightness keys, and on the 12th+ gen Framework added second descriptor for the ambient light sensor. On the AMD Frameworks Laptop (and the Core Ultra 1), the ALS is on a second interface entirely.
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to add a custom vendor-page HID descriptor. . . which I may do anyway for the fun keyboard stuff I’ve been working on.
I suspect that nobody wants to add more SMM or even Runtime Services code, but… that’s an interesting avenue for exploration. I do have an EC driver in my Framework UEFI driver toolkit; anything that they can do during DXE we can do as well
purportedly offered only to companies, but I have been looking for a loophole to get signed as a d.b.a. ↩︎
I had a look into this tool for Windows. It’s not clear if it prevents the use of bitlocker, that would be a blocker for me. Does anyone knows?
That being said, enabling test signing is an absolute no go for me.
But yes this is a real issue, I get the fans will be loud when gaming but when running discord + a browser tab opened on foundry vtt? I gets really weird when people start wondering what’s that noise and this is your FW16
