…And it would still be toasty. Airflow is not just an intake-only matter. It’s a combined restrictive outcome of BOTH intake and exhaust. What goes in, must come out…and what comes out must have gone in… Whichever the direction, if your flow restriction doesn’t change, your air flow rate doesn’t change. It’s not like you’re teleporting air just by having it going in another direction.
Still toasty!
People massively overestimate convection, especially for thermal gradients as small as we are dealing with there. Compared to even an extremely weak fan the air movement from convection disappears in the noise.
Propping up the back even a little bit is highly effective. Propping the back up by 1cm gives me over 5W extra sustained cooling performance, it’s diminishing returns after that.
Putting the laptop on a soft surface on the other massively reduces the cooling potential.
For me, if I only got a single wish, it’d be software: Linux color management, with an option to default to projection into an sRGB space for color-unaware programs.
… Bonus changes would be
1, power-efficient sleep with no effect from expansion cards (no hibernation);
2, MacBook-tier touchpad interactions in Linux (tracking, acceleration curve, palm rejection, configurable gestures);
and 3, MBP-or-better-tier speakers.
Agreed. If the battery drain was reasonable on sleep I wouldn’t need to fiddle with hibernation.
I’d like some cool-and-quiet mode where the CPU and GPU run in a low power mode for when I just want to quietly browse the web or do other stuff not needing any major system performance, without the fans ramping up.
That already exists, at least in my experience. I don’t notice any fan noise when I’m not running a game or compiling something, on either Framework laptop I’ve used. Have you tried setting your Power Profile to “Power Save”? I wonder if you’ve got a lemon.
Just way more expansion card slots.
storage, snack drawers, ethernet, screwdriver, audio, hdmi, usb a+c, dongle hiders, mag charge + all kind of niche or experimental or simply fun cards …
There is just way to much cool stuff for a limit of 4 or 6 cards.
(An ethernet expansion card in standard expansion card size or fixed included would be my second choice)
That just makes the screen go dim practically immediately after stopping to input something, which is super annoying.
I don’t think so. There are many reports like this. I might try to replace the thermal paste in the future with PTM or something.
The screen dimness can be set independently of the thing I’m talking about, er, at least on Linux.
If it was a hardware issue, if it even affected 1% of customers, you’d expect a lot of reports about it. I do vaguely remember it running kind of warm before I installed power-profiles-daemon. I haven’t got the laptop with me, but IIRC my Framework 16 would use around 8 watts idling and maybe 12 to 14 somewhere when I’d interact with it more (like browsing the web a bit). In both those cases, the fans weren’t particularly noticeable.
My point is just, I wouldn’t write off the possibility that you can wrangle the hardware into lower power usage (and thus lower heat); and if you can’t, it’s probably a hardware problem that isn’t universal, so contacting support might be a good option.
To be absolutely clear, my laptop is silent when idling, I just want to avoid the fan to ramp up if some weird animation heavy website or some badly optimized game causes 100% CPU usage for some reason and I’d prefer it if the website becomes slightly sluggish in that case instead.
As far as I can see, the fan ramping up on high CPU usage is normal behaviour, right?
I misunderstood you at first. For quiet fans during gaming, I don’t know. You might need an entirely different computer. For problematic web sites, that’s not been an issue for me, but I could see capping PPT at some low value and getting by like you’re describing (PPT being AMD’s name for TDP, maybe measured from a different place?). I see a fair bit of talk here in the forums about using RyzenAdj to do that. Framework 16 Thermals - #11 by Mario_Limonciello for example.
But yeah, the fans do spin up when the CPU starts processing. I’ve had it be relatively quiet doing a significant amount of compiling on battery in “Power Save” mode, so, whatever the power limit was set to there, if you went 5-10 watts below that, you might keep things pretty quiet all the time, if also underperformant.
Yeah I agree. I think setting system to power saver in Linux or “better battery” in Windows should accomplish this goal of gimping power limits to avoid boosty behavior.
You can also “just” turn off boost for CPU cores in Linux kernel 6.11 but keep the power limits turned up.
On Linux, when I’ve run things like games with naïve spinloops that use 100% CPU regardless of whether or not they have actual work to do (and thus trigger maximum frequency boost), limiting the kernel governor to the “nominal” CPU frequency using cpupower frequency-set cures the fan problem for me (i.e., the fans will not even turn on) with no real impact to performance since these apps are just behaving pathologically. (Frankly, I have many times forgotten to unrestrict the governor later and not even noticed. This CPU is fast!)
Hi.
I have an 11th Gen 1165G7 since Feb 2022 and on’t hear the fan except on dual boot i.e. before the OS jumps in.
Don’t hear it on Win11 or Ubuntu24 when browsing or using Libre Office, Gimp etc.
Windows > Best Power Efficiency
Settings in BIOS to disbale turbo
etc.
Are you using Gnome? I had this issue and in my searches for a solution the penultimate post on the bug report for this issue suggested gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power idle-brightness 100 as a fix, (didn’t work for me maybe you might have better luck) you could also try disabling PPD and using something else like Thermald or CPUPower.
ITS OFFICIALLY BEEN 3 YEARS!
Since October 2021, 3 years have passed. In that time, we’ve seen a myriad of changes to the Framework 13, the release of the Framework 16, and TONS of behind-the-scenes content courtesy of the Framework YouTube Channel!
In regards to the original poll, we’ve also covered a lot of ground with the changes initially voted upon.
Fully implemented:
Higher Refresh Rate Screen
Better Screen Resolution (Scaling)
Bigger/More Efficient Battery
Partially implemented/FW 16:
More Expansion Slots
2nd M.2 Slot
Larger Screen
Increased Build Quality
NOT Implemented (13):
Touch Screen
Trackpoint
Dedicated Charging Port
Larger Trackpad (13)
That all being said, what do you want to see from Framework for the future?
In other words, if you could make only 1 change to the Framework Laptop [13], what would it be?
I’m super interested to see how this has evolved since we initially discussed this back 36 months ago!
Personally, my #1 is a touchscreen, but I know trackpoints are real sticking points for some Thinkpad users. [1] [2] [3]
Get a discussion going! Speak how you feel!
My preferred change would be a smartphone-like touchscreen with a gorilla glass front. That would not only add touch (which can be useful is some cases) but would also make the screen much more robust and prevent ugly keycap marks.
The second preferred change, that would sort of go hand-in-hand, would be a redesigned case out of high-quality plastic or carbon fibers with a 360° hinge, you could convert it into a tablet. Plastic because I feel it will be lighter than aluminum and it will have less sharp edges. I always get my arm hairs stuck on small creases of the aluminum case of my Framework 13 and I hate it.
Blue bezel.
The super key has really been an OS issue not a manufacturing issue, anyway the key can be painted and etched.
As for
ARM-Powered Mainboard (Qualcomm or Otherwise)
There is this
I’m pretty sure that when people say they want an “ARM-Powered Mainboard” very few of them actually care about it being ARM.
What they really mean is they want a third CPU vendor option that is viable for day to day usage, competitive with the current CPU options, and has better battery life.
RISC-V is a long way from being viable for day to day usage and also a long way from being competitive with the current options. Intel and AMD are the only vendors of X86 CPUs. So that just leaves ARM based solutions (mainly the Snapdragon X Elite for the time being).