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.
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.