HDMI Module Power Drain Issue

[Djaysen_Mercey]

Hi there, I received my framework laptop today and so far everything seems to work just fine.

I am however curious about whether or not the Battery Drain issue caused by the HDMI module has been solved already, or if there is some sort of workaround, assuming it hasn’t been solved yet.

I asked this same question on reddit and got told that this issue continues to persist due to the fact that the issue lies with the hdmi module rather than the laptop itself. They haven’t gone into much further detail unfortunately, so I thought I’d ask here.

Thank you in advance.

[amoun]

Hi and welcome

This has been discussed in other topics, try a search.

If I find one I will update here and ask that your query be move to it.

What issue do you have?
When powered off there should be no drain
In sleep mode there will be

Maybe read the examples below and contribute in one of them

Example

Battery Life?

@Framework, seems like the HDMI expansion card is taking up around 1W of power (with no HDMI cable plugged in), which seems quite high. Did a ton of A/B tests on both Fedora and Windows, but basically idle and normal usage discharge rates are ~1W higher with the HDMI expansion card plugged in, vs. without. The USB-C and USB-A cards seem to draw a negligible difference. Right now, I’m running with the HDMI expansion card unplugged, and I don’t have another card to fill that hole . …

Expansion card power drain

Though it may help to have list of the drain each expansion card uses. I will update this as I get new and more accurrate data. I noticed that as soon as plug in the mains two of my expansion cards ‘draw’ power, so it’s not happening when in hibernate only when connected and switched off. &microSD with no card > 1.5W 256 GB SSD < 0.5 These are taken from a power supply that only records watts so the figures although fairly accurate overall may not be proportionaly accurate. NOTE: I should …

Display backlight, hdmi card using 10 watts power

I don’t think that the bios update caused this, but I did just update to 3.10 11th gen and this happened immediately afterwards. here is part of the output from powertop: The battery reports a discharge rate of 20.4 W The energy consumed was 409 J The estimated remaining time is 0 hours, 31 minutes Summary: 1608.3 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 97.5% CPU use Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description 9.63 W 45.0% …

[Azure]

@Djaysen_Mercey

assuming it hasn’t been solved yet.

@nrp

We are also working with our Expansion Card supplier on HDMI Expansion Card firmware with similar behavior.

Not solved yet, but if you read through this other thread, Framework is working on a firmware update for the card to solve this issue.

[Djaysen_Mercey]

thank you for the info.

I thought the power drain also happened when powered off completely. But if it doesn’t then It’s completely fine for me.

Thank you again for replying to my post.

[nrp]

For some more clarification on this, the issue is DP Alt Mode devices (HDMI Expansion Card and DisplayPort Expansion Card for example) keeping the Intel retimers from entering into a low power state. In theory they should, but in practice, there seems to be some bugginess in their behavior. This impacts active and standby power, but not shutdown/hibernate power usage. We have firmware work in progress which works around this issue and forces the retimers to suspend correct. In addition, we have a beta DisplayPort Expansion Card firmware that changes the card behavior to work around the retimer issue. We’re also working on HDMI Expansion Card firmware that does the same.