This may not exactly be a Framwork specific question, but I’m not sure where else best to ask. I have this Anker 67W multi-port wall charger and I’m having issues getting it to charge specifically my Framework 13 AMD.
When the laptop is the only thing plugged into the charger, it works fine. I plug it in and I see a solid amber LED indicating it’s charging. But, if I plug anything else in, even just a cable with nothing else on the other end, I get varying weird behaviors, whether the laptop is on or off:
- Most of the time, it starts flashing amber with a slow regular interval. If the laptop is on, I see the “now charging” indicator appear whenever it flashes (I’ve witnessed this across Fedora 39 and Debian 12).
- Sometimes, the LED is solid white, as if the max battery has been reached, when I know it hasn’t
- Very rarely, it just works as normal
My guess is the problem is with the design of the wall adapter and how it tries to “distribute power” across the ports. But it seems strange that even with nothing actually drawing power from the other ports, that my laptop would react this way. Additionally, my other laptop (a 2023 samsung laptop, supports USB-C PD) charges just fine with anything else plugged in.
The only thing I notice is that there’s no mention of PD on the charger’s product page or manual. Could that be part of the problem?
But Anker has responded on their Amazon listing of the product that it does support PD 3.0.
Thanks for any help.
As another data point, I have that charger and it seems to work well for me with the FW13 11th Gen Batch One. I sometimes plug a phone or tablet in for charging, as well. No issues with the FW.
Not really the same system, but USB-PD for all the good it is, does seem to have some quirks.
The Dell laptop from my work will charge with it, but complains about low voltage, when I plug a phone or tablet into the lower voltage port.
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Sure sounds like a power distribution problem with the charger.
May be linked to this issue. AMD Framework USB-C charger compatibility issues - #36 by patagona
To be clear, I don’t mean a PD issue, I mean an issue with the charger distributing power among it’s ports. From what I’ve seen most chargers will split power to the ports regardless of a load being hooked up, so a USB cable with nothing on it will drop your output on all ports and force a renogotiate. IIRC iphones had some problems with this in recent versions.
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Almost definitely that’s the issue. Most 65W chargers split power 45W+20W between the ports once anything is plugged in in both ports (instead of negotiating intelligently as would be possible by the PD spec).
Because the chargers don’t downgrade the already charging devices by PD communication and instead cut power and force a complete renegotiation, the Framework charging issue @lane_ftw linked is triggered.
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Is the other cable you are plugging in one of the ‘intelligent’ cables that negotiates the maximum allowable power transfer over the cable? If so, when you plug it into the charger that may be enough for the charger to renegotiate with the laptop how much power is available, then decide there is nothing on the cable and tell the laptop it can have some more, then decide that the intelligent cable may want something … and so on.