And would there be any reason it wouldn’t be possible to reach that speed if I’m using it with a non-pro mainboard?
I don’t think they’ve said.
But if I recall they’ve said other batteries charge at 1C, so I guess 1C for the Pro battery as well. That would be 74 watts. 1C is the usual norm for li-ions.
Why on earth do they sell a 240W charger then? What is that made for?
If you want a device to be able to charge while you are using it, then you must provide enough power to feed it’s entire power needs, on top of the power to charge the battery. The 240W power adapter was introduced for the Framework 16, which can have significant power needs, especially if you have the graphics expansion bay and screen brightness turned up.
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For Framework Laptop 16 with Graphics Module.
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AFIAK, every single Framework 13 Laptop has a controller that can take up to 100W, but all of them require only 60W to surpass their TDP.
During the presentation of the new battery and Panther Lake CPU, I believe they said something like “finally some hardware to utilize that 100W headroom” (not a direct quote by any means).
The Panther Lake specs lists 60W as max TDP, so maybe that 100W adapter is only for faster charging of that bigger 74Wh battery.
For the Laptop 16, as was noted. AFAIK, the first laptop to max out USB PD EPR (up to 240W) spec. And the 240W charger was highly requested, since nobody ever did one before Framework (again, AFAIK).
I bought one almost as soon as they released it.
The 13 Pro supports up to 140W USB-C charging, with 100W peak load and 40W to charge the battery.
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Then why is there a 60W TDP in the specs? I don’t believe that the motherboard and other components eat up that 40W headroom.
Sorry, this is mixing ideas.
I’m only talking about battery charging. The OP ask how many watts can the new 74wh battery charge at. Only the battery’s C-rate matters.
~edit~
This is what I recalled from Nrp
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Understood. This is the first time in my life I have seen the term 1C. I should have googled it before writing my reply.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, I should have mentioned what 1C is or linked to something. batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-402-what-is-c-rate
1C is easy as it just equals the battery capacity when new. 1C for an 85wh battery is 85W charging. 1C for a 74wh battery is 74W charging.
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The higher the max USB-C input power, the faster the battery charging under full load. If the max load is 60W, using a 100W charger will only charge the battery at 40W. Actual wattage is lower due to other losses bringing up higher than 60W of wattage. The battery will only reach max charging speed(in this case is 1C) when the power supply is powerful and the computer is off or at light load.
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Well, it is slightly more technical than that - it is the battery capacity at the one hour rate. A lot of battery chemistries will vary their capacity according to the discharge rate, so at 0.5C discharge you may find the equivalent of an extra 5% battery capacity. But 1C has become the defacto standard for quoting battery capacity and maximum charging rate.
Sorry, I don’t know if I follow? 85wh already says it’s specifically a watt-hour.
And sure, actual deliverable capacity varies with discharge current, but it doesn’t seem to matter for the conversation?
I must admit, I don’t even know what current the labeled capacity is at. Or if other Laptop makers might try to use lower than usual discharge currents to be able to claim higher capacity (lie, as far as I’m concerned). Just that for the previous FW batteries Nrp said the watt-hour label equaled the 1C charge rate, which is the max they are set for. 55wh label = 55W charging.
For one the 60w is steady state, modern silicon is very spiky. At least on the amd end on my 7840u board it still dips into battery with a 100w power supply because the ec tells the apu it can pull like 130w for really short amounts of time. I assume it will be similar on the intel side just with even more silicon.
Also bot charge controller (unless they added bypass mode now) and vrm losses + ram, fan and other axuiliary mainboard stuff could pretty easily eat the remaining 40w. Not that the default power profiles/cooling will allow it to do 60w for all that long anyway.
My 7840u set to 42w sustained with a charged battery and 50% display brightness pulls a bit under 80w from the charger during a stress test already.
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You are correct, but those who didn’t understand the 1C terminology didn’t seem to understand what the wh stood for either, which is why I expanded on it.
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The FL13 uses NVDC topology power path without bypass. A buck-boost converter is connected between the USB-C input and the mainboard’s power rail. The mainboard is connected in parallel to the battery with disconnect MOSFET. When the computer is connected to the charger. The input power can go either or both the battery and the mainboard. The most power it can take is 140W(pro)/100W(FL13 non-pro). If you use the 74Wh battery on a older mainboard, you’ll only get max charging speed when the computer is off or loaded very lightly. The max actual power is 100W X 0.9(EC program 0.9) X 0.9(buck-boost efficiency) = 81W, very close to 74W
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I would not be surprised if they added bypass on the pantherlake board, as far as I can tell it doesn’t require that much hardware, iirc only 2 extra mosfets so would not be that big a deal but probably not.
140W charging means >20v which means it either uses a different charge controller chip or also has a buck converter in front of the usual charge controller like a 16 (I hope not that’s ghetto as hell). It also means that if we did have bypass there all of the rest of the power conversion of the mainboard would have to be 28v tolerant which would mean a lot of new parts.
Where did you get the 140w number from? So far I only read you claiming that.
Edit: Nevermind it says 140W on the interfaces section in the specs page.
Edit2: there is the RAA489110 which appears to be a 30V tolerant pin and register compatible successor to the ISL9241 used in the other boards so they could switch to that with new input side passives and leave the rest alone. I guess we likely still won’t get bypass on the pro as that would need a lot of passives and everything dealing with vbus to be switched for 30V tolerant stuff which is a lot more change and probably not worth it. Bypass on 20V would have made sense as pretty much everything downstream can already tolerate it.
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