Not FW16, bug might related. I’m using an FW13 running Arch Linux. I set suspend on idle 10min on battery 1h on AC with battery charging limit set to 75%. When plugged in, the battery indicator often shows alternate between “75%, charging” and “75% discharging” when not in a gaming session. In addition to that, the laptop often suspends after 10min instead of 1h when running on AC.
My guess is there’s a miscommunication between the hardware and the OS, the OS believes that the computer is on battery when the battery is discharging.
I was able to force discharge during use last night, but I did not encounter a hard throttle. This was tested with the laptop both on max performance and balanced, with the stock 180W charger.
It could be the difference between the 7940 and the 7840 is just enough to cause this, or possibly other issues like increased thermal load leading to the throttle.
What rate of battery usage were you seeing against those two settings? I thought I remembered hearing on an old Q&A something about throttling enough to not discharge the battery on the Balanced setting.
So far, it’s not doing the mega-throttle when I bypassed the dock. It IS draining the battery by about 30% per hour though. This is using best performance settings.
I didn’t measure the rate running full out. I have a general fps limit set via rtss at 80.
When at that and set for best performance, I dropped about 8-10% after a 30 minute run.
No drain when at balanced, it charged slowly actually.
Just wanted to update this a bit. I thought that I could duck the issue but just sacrificing some power and gaming in balanced mode, but unfortunately, it also depletes the battery (though at a lower rate) and still runs into the hard throttle after a few minutes.
It’s also doing it while not plugged into the dock, so that theory has also run dry.
After a bit more testing, it doesn’t appear to triggering the hard throttle anymore (at least for now).
I have the laptop on a stand for better air flow and good lord, the bottom of the laptop on and around the USB C expansion card that the 180w charger is feeding is the hottest I’ve felt on a laptop. Like you can only leave your finger on it for a half a second hot. I can’t imagine what pushing 240w through it would do.
Did you try to connect the charging cable directly without the expansion card? A hot expansion card could lead to more resistance in the circuitry, and a lower wattage delivered. Also try to swap the expansion card for another USB C expansion card/or USB C port. This should not get boiling hot (my opinion). This can be a faulty expansion card problem.
I’ve tried some different combos over expansion cards, locations on the board, as well as bypassing the expansion card and plugging in directly (which didn’t seem to work for some odd reason).
I’ve also limited the frames for certain titles, but nothing has really made a dent so far.
With the help of support, I tried a new driver and also bypassed the expansion card to plug directly into the board for power. Currently, it’s not throttling in best performance mode! I played for an hour or so without issue. It did drain the battery by about 27% during that session, but one battle at a time.
I tried a couple different options - this one was the driver that the auto-detect tool from AMD gave me. Ultimately, it still throttled hard before long.
I haven’t encountered any sort of battery switch/hard throttling behavior you’re describing here, but I have noticed that my battery drains by a fairly significant amount during what I would consider to be moderately heavy loads. Example: playing Subnautica for 20 minutes drains about 9% total capacity from the battery. On average, the CPU is drawing ~30w and the GPU ~90w, and the battery is discharging at around 15w. (I’m getting those numbers from “CPU Package Power”, “Total Graphics Power”, and “Battery Charge Rate” respectively on Hardware Info. If those are not the right entries for me to be looking at, feel free to correct me.)
To be honest, I’m a little sussed out by those numbers and wonder if maybe my laptop isn’t actually drawing a full 180w from the brick. The math doesn’t really math, ya know? 90 + 30 + maybe another 30 for the rest of the system should still put me well shy of the 180w power limit. On the other hand, if something wonky happened to the USB PD configuration and the laptop is only drawing 140w from the brick… suddenly that explains why the battery discharges like it does. I’ll be watching the first few BIOS and Driver updates closely to see if one of them addresses battery/power issues. Otherwise, I’ll definitely be grabbing a 240w brick the moment a company releases one to see if that addresses the power drain.
Bear in mind, there will be losses at all stages. The 180 watt supply itself will have to convert from AC to regulated DC. My FW 60 watt power supply measures at 92-93% efficient, which is pretty darn good. If the 180 watt charger is similar, expect it to draw around 195 watts in order to supply 180. Then that 180 watts, delivered at 36V, will have to get converted in the laptop, resulting in some loss as well. That loss means that there won’t be the full 180 available for use by the computer. I don’t know how efficient that conversion process is.
Mostly, I just wanted to make sure people understand that a power supply rated to deliver 180 watts out, will draw a bit more than that. How much more will depend on its efficiency.
I was having this issue myself in starcraft 2. It may have been happening in other games too. However, it was the only game that I have played on it so far that was graphicly intensive. I noticed that the muk switch was not properly transferred from the Igpu to the DGPU. Starcraft ran off the IGPU, so I got 20-30 fps. Shockingly it was still rather smooth even though the game was set to high settings. I noticed this thanks to the program FPS monitor. I had to go into the AMD adrenalin software and change how the Muk switch functioned. I believe it has changed for every game now. but by default, it was not swapping to the DGPU for graphically intensive tasks. I don’t believe that this is a direct issue with Framework itself, as I have had the same issue with an MSI laptop running and Nvidia GPU as well. That is why I even thought to check what GPU was being used. I should also note that Starcraft was saying it was using the DGPU; however, an AMD setting was not letting it swap to that GPU. I feel like this issue could easily be resolved in a driver pack from Framework or AMD. So keep checking the driver pack page. I usually check it weekly.