I’m seeing reviews that claim the battery still drains (slowly, over 8 hours?) while plugged in and gaming or doing other heavy load that uses the dedicated GPU.
I also see here that it’s in the official documentation that it’s possible to drain the battery under extreme load.
Are there any plans for Framework to offer a 240W charger any time soon? As far as I can tell, nobody makes a 240W USB-C Charger (yet) - and the FW16 is one of the first laptops (if not the first?) to support 240 USB-C charging.
Have any of you managed to drain the battery so much that it’s gotten in the way of your productivity or gaming? What’s the fastest you’ve managed to drain the battery while plugged in?
Edit - I should mention that I’m going to be using Linux as my daily driver - not Windows. So any anecdotal experience specific to Linux would be appreciated!
I’ve had an impossible time locating a charger the can deliver over 100w to a single device. There’s clearly not many around yet so I would appreciate at least a heads up when they start becoming available, regardless of who is offering them. Maybe we should start a mega thread in the same vein as the one for docks so we can verify which chargers work and how much power they can actually provide.
Played Flight Sim and Starfield for 3+ hours, battery charged from 80% to the 95% I have it capped at.
Also did some video up-scaling stuff that was a few hour job without battery drain.
I was the person running the linked YouTube channels post on Reddit, running a Timespy benchmark looping, and had my battery charge not drain while it was running.
I’m running the 7700S GPU and the 7840HS CPU. Maybe its an issue with the the 7940HS pulling more power than the 7840 can.
I’m running the 7700S GPU and the 7840HS CPU. Maybe its an issue with the the 7940HS pulling more power than the 7840 can.
I think you are probably on to something with the suspicion about 7840 vs 7940. My pre-order is 7840 - so hopefully I’ll have the same experience as you!
Framework is the first to produce a 180W USB-C charger brick. That was evidently a struggle in itself requiring FW changes to the brick and delaying the shipping of the FW16 in the beginning. I don’t think you’ll currently find an equivalent or larger charger at this point in time. We’re just now getting wide acceptance of 100W usb-c charger bricks.
After a while you might start seeing some charger bricks reaching that 240W limit once this 180W is recognized and accepted as a default option for laptops. So maybe in a year or 2?
Slimq Also makes a 150W USB-C PD 3.1 charger, and it has world wide plug adapters. Considering their other options, I would bet they will be first out with a 240W USB-C… https://slimq.life
I played Helldivers 2 for probably about 4 hours straight last night with the laptop in performance mode in Arch Linux/KDE Plasma. Battery drained from around 85% to down to 30% in that time while plugged into the Framework 180W charger. However, when it got to 30% is actually started charging back up to 35% or so before I stopped playing. I was more curious last night at how fast I could drain it. But you can definitely tune your games to avoid draining the battery, or probably run in balanced power profile.
Mine drains more or less about the same in performance on Fedora 39 - however, in balanced, no drain - still more than playable FPS as well. I get about 50-70 on helldivers 2 with Balanced profile set.
I’ve had battery drain on performance mode when gaming on both Fedora 39 and windows 11, depending on the game. But generally if it uses all of the GPU then it’ll drain from battery. I have not had that actually be an issue though. It lasts 7+ hours and I never game that long. (this is with 7840 btw, so it definitely still drains with that)
Overall I see it as a non-issue, the only time I could see it being a problem is if you need to do performance intensive tasks over a very large period of time (like rendering animations or something like that) or if you just game for that long at a time. In that case, though, you can always just go onto balanced mode and you shouldn’t see any battery drain. There’s a bit of a performance difference but it’s not huge, could always lower settings a little to compensate too.
Still, would be cool to see a 240W charger. Should be more than enough for everything - in my (albeit limited) experimentation, it seems it draws between 10-20W from the battery while plugged in and under extreme load, so 240W should be more than enough to provide power to everything and even charge the battery some if needed.
I did, but like a lot of people I prefer to have 2 charging setups, one stationary and one portable. I had hoped that by the time the 16 started shipping there would be some more options, including the fabled 240w pd charger. Searching for chargers has been full of false positives since many chargers are listed at total power capacity not single port capacity. A 240w charger with 4 ports that can deliver 100w max on a single port is not a 240w charger in my book, it’s a 100w charger that can handle multiple devices. It’s not a huge deal for me but I hope those chargers will become available soon and be easy to spot without having to carefully examine every detail in the poorly organized product page full of images that show the happy people around the device instead of the details of the device
Good day.
Found two 240w chargers, Baseus Digital GaN and Slimq with type C adapter.
Asked Slimq about 240w and 330w chargers.
Here is their answer “It won’t help. the 240W would be 48V 5A. for your laptop, it will still pump 36V 5A max”
48v over USB C is still only in standards, hasn’t been officially done yet because no one has been able to manage the cutoff requirements needed to prevent arcing/electrocution when unplugging under load. The irony is that the arc potential isn’t actually that much higher than 36v, it’s just the price of the 48v internal hardware needed in the charger that is higher.
Are you set to balanced power profile? The guy in this video did a vid where he tested Power vs Balanced and Balanced was super efficient in comparison with like… 4fps less at most (Red Dead Redemption 2 & CyperBunk 2077) and made the charger catch up.
