I am having issues with my 12th Gen i5 (Batch 4). I am running Windows 10, 32 GB Ram, 1 TB storage.
Last night the computer suddenly died even though it was plugged in. I didn’t notice the battery was still depleting until I got a warning that the battery was at 5% and then it quickly drained to zero while I kept unplugging and replugging the charger into my two different USB-C ports. I had been using an Anker USB-C hub that connected my ethernet and other USB peripherals. The Framework charger was plugged into that hub and then the hub into a USB-C expansion port. Initially I thought the issue was the Anker hub so I removed that and plugged the charger in directly to the expansion port. For a little bit it seemed not even that was charging but after a while it worked and when I woke up this morning the laptop battery was at 100%.
Now I have issues with the HDMI expansion port. The HDMI cable is plugged into an expansion port (the same one it is has been at for a couple months) and connected to my monitor. The monitor is giving me an error that no signal is being received. I tried a different HDMI cable and got the same message. I then tried a different monitor and nothing was displaying. I am fairly certain the issue with my laptop and no the component cable or monitors. Windows pings like a device has been connected but nothing displays.
Lastly, now that all these issues are popping up with different display ports I am also wondering if a reoccurring issue that started last month with my eGPU is not connected to things. I had been using an eGPU for a few months with no problem, but then suddenly one day last month it stopped being recognized by the laptop. I would connect the thunderbolt cable to a USB-C port and Windows would ping like a USB device was connected but nothing happened. The eGPU fans would spin for a moment before turning off but the GPU fans would never spin. Since then I have pulled my hair out trying different things because I had thought that it was the eGPU housing or the actual GPU but now I am not so sure. Occasionally, if I prayed to the PC masterlord I would plug in the GPU and it would be recognized and I could use it, but that was like 1 in 20 times and usually after not having tried for a few days. Usually I could only get that one session in because once the laptop went to sleep it would not be recognized upon waking.
So I have three seemingly disparate issues but all of them are connected (haha) to my expansion card ports. Any ides on how to troubleshoot expansion card issues?
I have a problem where my USB ports don’t seem to provide enough power. For example, a drive will connect fine as USB 2 but not as USB 3 (or if it does manage to connect as USB 3, it will randomly disconnect later. USB 3 has higher power requirements than USB 2, by the way.) I started using an Anker powered USB-C hub which I plug my 1 TB expansion card and USB-A backup drive into, and everything works great through the powered hub. If I don’t power the hub then the drives can be flaky again. These are some of the clues that this might be a power situation.
Edit: I just want to clarify that I saw an analogy to your situation because one of the symptoms my USB-A drive has when failing to show up after connecting it is that the drive’s light turns on, but the drive itself doesn’t show up (as described in my Quirky USB port post).
I’ve been talking to support on-and-off for over a year about it, replaced my mainboard, replaced my 1 TB expansion card, but we still haven’t figured out a solution.
I’m curious how many people have similar problems and whether anybody has solved them?
Does everything work OK if you plug into the Anker hub? If not, sorry for the hijack and I’ll delete this post! But I keep wondering if a lot of people have some sort of power related USB issues with the Framework laptop. This is based on other threads, especially the 1 TB Expansion disconnect thread, which I wish we could unlock because I have more insights to share in it!
I feel like I’ve been repeating this a lot lately, but the 12th gen boards do not officially support Windows 10
This means that the drivers that Framework provides will not properly provide compatibility. While you are welcome to try to make that OS work on the hardware, contacting support may lead to them recommending that you install a supported OS, and user feedback may not be helpful as it could be a hardware/software incompatibility.
I did not know this. I am going to go ahead and bite the bullet and upgrade to Windows 11 and see if maybe that helps things. For now the expansion cards work as expected (except for GPU, but that may be a separate issue) but it can’t hurt to go to 11, I will have to eventually…
Which USB C hub do you have? What kind of devices are at tached?
Depending on the answer it may be too less power.
I have a Razer Core X eGPU with AMD RX 6600 and the GPU fans only spin when the GPU temperature is >= 50°C. So pretty much never, not even under a moderate workload. This is a feature of my GPU though.
So no running GPU fans mean nothing.
A better indicator would be to check the dmesg and lspci output.
