I love my Framework 13 the way it is but an improvement 2mm-3mm extra thickness and swappable mechanical keys, and dedicated buttons across the top of the trackpad. This slight extra thickness might also allow for a larger battery.
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Well, I understand what you say, if we really want to wait for buying Expansion Cards, you can still charge the laptop, because as you know it is a USB C in the end.
I think it wouldn’t be good removing Expansion Card ports, but I understand the critic, I think, what should solve that would be, making a official dual USB-C and USB-A expansion cards, and ship at least one USB-C Expansion Card in the price of even DIY orders
Honestly? I’d reverse the fans. I’d rather have it intake through the back and exhaust out the bottom than have it intake through the bottom and exhaust out the top.
Most places where I actually use my laptop I have it on a surface where the intake can be partially blocked (bed, carpet, couch arm, etc) and as a result it can get pretty toasty if I don’t bring along a laptop rest.
Well, if you can work out the physics to reverse the operation of a centrifical fan i’m sure something could be done. It works the way it does because of the way physics works (insert Dr Spock quote here).
I mean, you’re right, but it could be said nicer.
Apart from animals like us that have a constant temp, only farts go out the bottom. The most efficient is a large skin area.
Where a fan is used in the laptop case the hot air automatically rises so it would be counter productive to push it down and heat the bottom of the laptop.
Keeping a tray nearby to rest the laptop on would be more productive, but not for fart gas as that may make your pants ignite.
Longer legs will keep the bottom higher.
I’d like to see SSD hardware encryption support. Yes, I’m aware the real culprit here is Microsoft removing support from Windows. However there’s well documented methods to enable hardware bitlocker encryption if FW exposed a few BIOS options that are currently not available to us.
I hope whatever’s going on in your life starts getting better, pal.
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…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!
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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.
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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.
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