Framework Desktop BIOS Evolutions

I find the Framework Desktop motherboard BIOS very minimalist and would like to see it improved in future versions.

If you agree, please indicate the settings you would like to see added. For my part, here are the desired improvements:

1/ Operating mode settings:

Eco Mode: 25W power
Balanced Mode: 65W
Performance Mode: 120W → 100W
Extreme Mode: 160W → 140W

2/ Ability to define the boot device priority.

For example:

1-USB Device

2-SSD 1

3-SSD2
This would avoid having to access the BIOS every time.

3/ PCIe Port Management:

SSD1 NVMe PCIe: Enabled/Disabled
SSD2 NVMe PCIe: Enabled/Disabled
Wi-Fi/Bluetooth: Enabled/Disabled
RJ45 Port: Enabled/Disabled
PCLe x4 Port: Enabled/Disabled

4/ Display of the actual speed of the 3 fans in the BIOS.

(Possibly available plugins to display these values ​​in software such as AIDA64, HWMonitor, HWinfo64, etc.)

5/ Option to configure SSD1 and SSD2 in RAID 0 or RAID 1 mode.

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I would love to see the speed of my PSU fan in HWMonitor.

Eco Mode sounds interesting, would this cap power consumption? Or simply set a baseline?

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I don’t think the 25W ECO mode would actually limit power consumption because it would lengthen process execution time. It would primarily limit the processor’s computing power, preventing it from overheating if it’s not needed (for example, for small, non-urgent tasks to be performed overnight).

A big “yes” to that

I would not be a big fan of the choice of power modes. 160W is beyond what the stock cooling solution can reasonably handle. This makes only sense when you are creating a custom cooling solution with custom machined cold plate and for that extreme overclocking you’d want to use ryzenadj anyway because you would really want to undervolt as well.

Those power setting choices also miss entirely the most interesting range of 80-100W. 100W is where you get almost the same performance as with even 140W, while 80W has the best balance of power to performance (at maybe ~ 10% performance loss) in my opinion.

You’re right, the 160W Extreme mode would only increase component temperatures and fans noise.

So I’m changing the Extreme mode to 140W and the Performance mode to 100W.

2 Likes

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Yes to all of these!
Too bad framework is using a closed source bios that they, or we, can’t do anything with.

2 Likes

I think these are really good ideas, but some of them don’t seem practical.

  1. Operating modes - Could definitely be useful, my framework 13 has the ability to disable cores and max turbo iirc.
  2. Is this not already implemented? I could have sworn I can do this already. There’s the boot manager (f8) and boot options (within setup f2), and i thought I could set this in one of those. Tell me if i’m wrong though, it definitely should be a feature.
  3. This I think is also a good feature, again I think I can disable wifi/bt on my fw13? As people have suggested, very useful for preventing accidental (or malicious) data destruction wrt storage. I’m not sure how it can safely be implemented though, as PCI enumeration is done by the OS. I believe the ACPI tables tell the OS what peripherals there are but I think the OS could still scan for/initialise a device.
  4. this should be simple to do, i don’t see why not
  5. probably not practical as it wouldn’t be transparent to the OS without hardware RAID. I’d recommend setting up MDRAID on linux and having matching boot partitions, not sure how to do something similar on windows though. Nice idea in practice, but I don’t think it’s practical/useful.

If i’ve actually gotten something wrong please tell me, otherwise this is my opinion and it may be different to yours. Definitely some cool ideas though.

~Skyler

I like that 160w mode!!!

Definitely