[FW16 Ryzen AI 300 + RTX 5070 + Fedora 44] Only 1 of 4 external displays working via HDMI expansion cards

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
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[FW16 Ryzen AI 300 + RTX 5070 + Fedora 44] Only 1 of 4 external displays working via HDMI expansion cards

Hardware:

  • Framework Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series)
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU (GB206M)
  • AMD Radeon 880M/890M iGPU (Strix Point)
  • BIOS: 03.06 (04/23/2026)
  • 4x Framework HDMI Expansion Cards

Software:

  • Fedora 44
  • Kernel: 7.0.12-201.fc44.x86_64
  • NVIDIA driver: 595.80 (RPM Fusion akmod-nvidia)
  • KDE Plasma / Wayland

Slot layout:

  • Slot 1 (left-hinge): USB-C
  • Slot 2 (left-middle): Ethernet
  • Slot 3 (left-nearest): HDMI
  • Slot 4 (right-nearest): HDMI
  • Slot 5 (right-middle): HDMI
  • Slot 6 (right-hinge): HDMI

Problem:
Framework’s product page advertises support for up to four external displays via four HDMI expansion cards. However, only 1 external display is working (slot 6), plus the built-in laptop display. The other three HDMI cards produce no output.

Earlier in the session I had 2 external displays working (slots 3 and 6, or similar), but after installing the NVIDIA proprietary driver and experimenting with nvidia-drm.modeset=1, I regressed to 1 external display. Removing those parameters restored 1 external display but not 2.

Diagnostics:

Only 3 of 4 HDMI cards are detected as USB devices at boot:

[2.087338] usb 5-1: Product: HDMI Expansion Card
[2.752087] usb 3-2.1: Product: HDMI Expansion Card
[3.409777] usb 3-2.3: Product: HDMI Expansion Card

The 4th card is completely absent from dmesg.

DRM status shows only 2 connected outputs despite 4 HDMI cards:

cat /sys/class/drm/*/status
# only 2 x 'connected', rest 'disconnected'

kscreen-doctor -o shows only eDP-1 (laptop) and DP-2 (one external Dell 4K).

All display output goes through the AMD iGPU (card1/amdgpu). The NVIDIA RTX 5070 shows Disp.A: Off in nvidia-smi and has no connected DRM outputs.

Kernel cmdline:

rhgb quiet modprobe.blacklist=nouveau rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau

What I’ve tried:

  • Moving HDMI cards between slots — slot 2 (left-middle) produced a display when tested temporarily
  • Installing NVIDIA proprietary driver 595.80
  • Adding/removing nvidia-drm.modeset=1 nvidia-drm.fbdev=1
  • Verifying nouveau is fully blacklisted and absent from initramfs
  • Confirmed Secure Boot is disabled

Questions:

  1. Is there a known limitation with the Ryzen AI 300 mainboard on Linux limiting external display output to fewer than 4 simultaneous displays?
  2. Are there specific slots that are confirmed to support display output on this mainboard revision?
  3. Is this a known amdgpu driver issue with Strix Point that is being tracked?

I’ve seen similar reports from other FW16 Ryzen AI 300 + RTX 5070 users on Linux:

This is a work machine and I specifically chose it over a MacBook Pro based on Framework’s advertised four-display support. Any guidance from Framework engineers or community members with the same hardware would be hugely appreciated.

1 Like
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I can’t say much for the Linux side of things, and it would seem there might be something else going on, but I am not knowledgeable here.

However I’ll just note that for the Ryzen AI 300 FW16, the 4 ports closest to the hinges are the only ones that support display output, which seems different to how you have set it up.

Reference:

3

Hey! Please reach out to our support and ask to speak to the Linux team. They’ll be happy to take a look for you!

4

One thing I would separate here is slot support vs driver state. On the Ryzen AI 300 FW16 the display-capable bays are the four closest to the hinges, so the two “nearest/front” bays are worth removing from the test layout entirely. I’d test one HDMI card at a time in each supported bay before mixing them again. If a card does not appear at all in dmesg on a known-good display-capable bay, that points more to card/slot/firmware than NVIDIA modeset. If all four work individually, then collect kscreen-doctor -o plus /sys/class/drm/*/status after a cold boot and send that to Framework support as Eagle suggested.