Up to date, standalone PCIe switches appear expensive. The cheaper commercial 1x or 4x ones I have seen in mining aren’t at PCIe 3 or 4. Maybe if the fpga packages with suitable ser-des become cheap when ordered at a large volume.
An fpga capable of doing what a plx chip can is going to be a whole lot more expensive than a plx chip, especially once we go to pcie4 or 5
About the power situation, maybe we can add a barrel jack and power management system to the GPU extension board and feed the laptop via the board, not the board via the laptop. This way we can be free of the power restrictions of the board and provide the GPU with more power.
The power connection to the Expansion Bay does “provide a power path for power input from the Expansion Bay to the host.” From the GitHub documentation:
This allows power to be fed from the Expansion Bay back into the laptop in an Extended Battery scenario or another type of card that has a power supply attached.
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This would be nice! I would love to use my GPU on my framework 16. I will brag so much 
I think I would even travel with the FW16 and the eGPU. Hopefully when the FW 16 is release someone can work on this project.
Already in work from some users. Watch this thread:
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Thank very much for the this valuable information, I will definitely look into it!
I have pre-ordered the Framework laptop 16 and am looking very much forward to using it! Now, I would really like some extra graphical horsepower on my machine, but for me it seems to be that the only dGPU option offered by Framework is a little too underwhelming for me.
While doing some research on Thunderbolt 3/USB4, I saw that those protocols only support 4 pcie lanes. Later I discovered that the expansion bay has 8 pcie lanes available, which is awesome. How cool would it be to be able to connect an external GPU to those 8 pci lanes through the expansion bay?
I read a lot about some kind of expansion bay variant that holds two m.2 slots which can be used. M.2. slots have by themselves 4 pci lanes, but it is possible to directly attach an GPU to them with the help of a M.2 to PCIE riser. See these links: https://www.amazon.com/ADT-Link-Extender-Graphics-Adapter-PCI-Express/dp/B07YDH8KW9 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ovihMPo-q8.
This resulted in me wondering how hard it would be to make or design a variant of the expansion bay that has the ability to connect to an external GPU? I would love to spend some time to discover this myself, but I’m a software engineer, not a hardware engineer / machine designer 
Anyone in the know here?
I learned my lesson, search first on a forum and then post if you can’t find it.
A thread on this already exists: Any Chance of Desktop GPU Connection with Expansion Bay?
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Hey there!
There’s been some interest in hiding away USB dongles (like the Unify ones for Logitech mice and keyboards) in Expansion Cards: Dongle Hider - #63 by LA-MJ (With Arya’s USB-A-ugment being a really neat solution.)
I was curious, since the interposer has a few pins for USB: Could one use these to connect a dongle? And how realistic would it be to break them out in the Expansion Bay Shell?
Is there anything in terms of documentation or CAD files for the Shell? Or maybe some pictures of how it looks inside?
I’d be curious to hear y’alls thoughts!
Yep. Assuming you’re talking about the regular Expansion Bay module, not the GPU one, you would need to just make a PCB with a USB port for the dongle.
PCB Reference Design and CAD for the shell is here. But the shell has a removable back panel, so you don’t even need to print a whole replacement shell. You could just print a back panel with a door or cutout to reach your dongle.
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Thanks @MJ1!
I didn’t see the Marketplace listings for the FW16 parts, but they have some useful pics: The Interposer
Looks like the interposer only breaks out the pins that are needed for the fans, so I’d probably have to make my own interposer PCB with a mainboard connector and pogo pins (or a complete replacement for the fan board instead of the latter), right?
I guess I could try fiddling in some very small wires to the USB data pins on the standard interposer, but that doesn’t sound like it’d work very well or be much fun…
Sounds like an awful lot of effort to get at a USB connection. Why not just connect to one of the USB2 ports that the keyboard, mouse etc connect to. Because of the way all the items in that area can be moved around and mixed and matched there will be unused USB ports there that you could connect to.
True, and good idea with the Input Module connectors! (I assume you’re talking about those?)
Just a question of how to connect and route the wires, and where to put the wires. I’ll think about that when I have the Laptop tho, seems easier than staring at pictures and trying to make a mental model of the insides only to realize it doesn’t go together quite how you think
I thought about using it too, but then I’d still need a replacement or adapter for the fan board that also breaks out the USB pins. At that point, I think making a replacement for the interposer would be easier.
(Replacing the fan board would however have the benefit of a much easier and cheaper PCB, since there’s no need for an interposer connector, only the nuts, afaict)
Yes, those are what I was thinking about.
Well the details are on the github repository. I would think it should be possible to make a PCB with the USB connections at one end, and have gold fingers for the contacts that go into the USB connector on the dongle at the other end. The dongle would live somewhere down in the keyboard area was what I envisage.
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I will start:
2x Expansion Card Expansion Bay. Or just have fixed I/O like USB/DP/Ethernet. eSATA (maybe). Full-sized SD card would be nice.
25G 2x (RX and TX) Fiber link. Not sure why anyone would want that.
External (via a thick cord) PCIe 8x slot/enclosure (probably not gen 4, maybe gen 3/2. Doesn’t really matter). Graphics back-feed? Not entirely sure how that works.
“Legacy Bay” – RS232 (maybe 12V power as well?), Parallel Port, PS2 (maybe), dial up, PCMCIA(?). Maybe built-in VGA (or better, DVI-D). Doesn’t have to be super powerful.
4x NVMe 2280 (or longer) RAID. SATA support would be very nice.
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- SATA SSD/HDD bay
- Blu-ray or DVD player bay (or at least a holder for an external player)
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Speakers/3.5mm jack with a hardware equalizer! This laptop already has huge potential as a producer’s dream. Nothing would be funnier than flipping your laptop over to fiddle with some SMD slide pots for better sound.
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