After ordering my Ryzen AI 7 350, I also placed an order for the Intel AX210 WiFi adapter based on previous recommendations. I didn’t even try the Mediatek RZ717, but installed the AX210 right away. I started to feel like my battery drains a lot during sleep and did some investigations. It looks like the AX210 is increasing sleep power consumption quite a bit on Windows.
I installed both the Framework driver pack, and the Intel AX210 drivers. My expansion cards 1, 2 and 3 are USB C and the expansion 4 is USB A. According to the docs this expansion card configuration should give the lowest power consumption.
Running powercfg.exe /SleepStudy and I can see my battery drains at an approximate rate of 2% per hour in sleep. When digging deeper I can see my WiFi adapter as being the problem:
For now I will switch back to the original RZ717, but wanted to document my findings for others. If you switched to the AX210, take a look at the sleep battery drain. Maybe you have a problem as well.
As a sanity check have you tried running your test without the wifi card?
Power attributing is hard and this may very well be pointing at the wrong thing here.
I did test the impact of removing the ax210 on min idle on my 7480U and the difference between not plugged in, wifi and bluetooth disabled and wifi connected and bluetooth on were margin of error (so less than about 0.2W in my testing setup).
It is of course possible it does something weird when sleeping though.
As you can see in my configuration the AX210 is causing excessive battery drain during sleep. Without WiFi and with the stock RZ717 the laptop sleeps properly and battery drain is minimized.
Perhaps this is fixable with some software tweaks, but for now I will stick to the RZ717 and see if it works without issues
Interesting, maybe it doesn’t get put to sleep right, pretty sure that thing doesn’t pull over half a w when running normally so it doing that during sleep is a bit weird XD.
Yes, from what I can interpret from the sleep study it is not the WiFi card itself consuming the power. It is somehow keeping the computer in a higher power state during S0 low power idle. As you can see on the % LOW POWER STATE TIME column, with the AX210 the computer spends 0% of time in the correct low power state. I expect one day we will figure out exactly why this happens.
Leaving a reply here to stay updated to future replies! I’ve just received my FW13 with 7640u; I’ve purchased the AX210 WIFI too based on recommendations.
I will assemble mine tomorrow and do a sleep study. There are quite a few things related to sleep, ssd cycles, connectivity and power drain that i’d like to investigate. I will post my findings here once I have them!
In the meantime, OP have you tried disabling Network Connectivity in your OS’ modern standby?
I’ve made some observations and notes here about the AX210 on my new FW13!
I wasn’t experiencing the same critical offence pointing to the wifi card, but I did find some suspicious warnings logged in my event viewer, which occurred at the exact same time that a series of wakes that took place in my sleep study, that ultimately kept my system from sleeping properly and drained the battery.
Mhh, just received my Ryzen AI 300 board as well and I am seeing the same artifact as OP, the PCIe slot GPP5 of the AX210 WiFi card is red, the WiFi card itself not. I did not reinstall Windows moving from 12th gen. Intel. Except for the sleeping problems, I have seen no issues yet. I would only want to do a clean install if there is a credible reason, that it is affecting sth. / causing issues compared to a Ryzen AI 300 board with a clean install.
Since I am upgrading from the 12th gen board and the RZ717 is not available to buy with the bare board, I currently have not much choice except for sticking with the AX210 until Framework allows me to buy the card that apparently is required to pair up with this board…
If there are any other ideas how to work around this I am all ears. Long term, I want a new WiFi card anyway, so I can use the AX210 with the old board (standalone use, right now its missing the WiFi card entirely) and the BE200 apparently won’t work at all on AMD boards.
PS: I also had issues with the notebook never going to sleep (power LED constant on) that I thought might be related. But after putting it to sleep once under Linux this seems solved now. Now only the auto-brightness keyboard backlight still comes on during sleep sometimes, which seems like a simple EC firmware issue.
I feared that this might have sth. to do with me not clean-installing Windows, but since the only thing that remains is sth. that seems more like a hardware / firmware issue, I’ll wait.
