So after a little bit of poking around I’ve found that the battery draining while gaming seems to be an issue with the FW charger not being able to keep up with the power draw of the laptop.
Would it be possible to connect two chargers to the laptop through separate ports at the same time to compensate for that?
Or is that like a really bad idea and likely to break something if I try?
Welcome to the forum.
It will not hurt anything at all. But it will not provide additional power. The laptop will choose the power supply which offers the highest wattage and use that one. Due to how modern switch mode power supplies work, using two different ones simultaneously to power one device is difficult and complex. Almost no laptops can do this. The only one someone linked to, I saw users say it’s buggy and often doesn’t work.
There is a higher wattage power supply available. Give me a moment.
240W USB PD power supply, model ADP-240KB BA from Delta Electronics. Mouser and DigiKey both have it. Other community members are using it.
DigiKey | ADP-240KB BA Delta Electronics
Mouser | ADP-240KB BA Delta Electronics
Alternatively you can switch to a power saving mode so that the battery doesn’t drain.
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Hi @Hyphonetics,
Welcome to the community. @MJ1 is correct that there is only one 240W charger available currently that will overcome the battery drain with max performance settings.
Framework’s 180W supply was one of the first of its kind available and it is harder to design and come up with an efficient 240W USB-C PD charger that follows the v3.1 specification. The Delta charger linked is a good product, though it has a fixed USB-C cable. Eventually others will come on the market that follow the upper end of this specification; it will take time though.
Changing the performance mode in Windows or Linux will help keep it from draining the battery completely like @MJ1 said. Alternatively, turning down the settings in some games will also limit the power consumption. Another strategy is turning off cores in the BIOS to limit the performance of the machine.
Framework knew that the laptop would be capable of consuming more power than their custom charger could handle. I applaud the work they did to come up with a machine that stuck with being powered by USBC instead of a barrel jack charger. They knew the specification was written for 240W and designed a performance machine capable of using the higher wattage.
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@MJ1 I’d seen mention of those power supplies, at this point I think I’ll wait until something a bit more consumer oriented/friendly comes to market.
Good to know that while multiple power supplies wouldn’t be beneficial it also wouldn’t cause any harm.
I appreciate your detailed response.
@pkunk The 180W charger is enough in most situations so I completely understand Framework not developing or including a 240W for the small percentage of edge case uses where the laptop draws that much power. I’m going to limit my power settings and I’m sure that’ll be perfectly fine.
In my eyes, it’s a great problem to have. Like you said, they designed a machine capable of using the higher wattage. They’re a laptop company, not a charger company, so including a supply that works for most scenarios even if it doesn’t meet the limit of what the machine is capable of makes perfect sense.
I’m sure in time as more devices support, or require, 240W we’ll see more chargers come to market.