got the new 10G Realtek Expansion Card and my Framework 13 Pro.
One thing I noticed, no matter on my old Framwork 13 or my new 13 Pro the new card seems to have a standby idle issue. When plugged in and I have the laptop in sleep, taking it out from my bagpack (yes no cable connected :)) it feels significant warm on the card.
Checked powerstat and in idle, nothing connected to the card, powerstat shows 2-3W more powerdraw than without the card. The old 2.5G card doesnt show this behavior, also not getting warm when the laptop is in sleep.
Anybody can confirm this or do I have a faulty card?
Framwork 13 pro intel, Kubuntu 26.04.
powerstat 60s full idle without card:
2.82 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.58
same with card:
4.96 Watts on average with standard deviation 2.85
I don’t have an answer, but just for experimentation, could you boot into the BIOS with the card installed, and leave it for a few minutes? It would be interesting to see if the card merely has to be plugged in when the machine is on for it to consume power (and overheat) or whether the OS has to initialise it on the USB side (I assume that won’t happen when you’re looking at the BIOS screen).
If it does not get hot in that state then I wonder if it just needs a software fix. From here I would try another OS, even just booted from a memory stick.
Did you install the out of tree drivers for it or how are you running it?
The mainline drivers for that chipset are extremely new so power management may not actually be all that implemented jet especially assuming an ubuntu derivative probably isn’t on the newest kernel jet (google says 7.0 which iirc does not support the chipset at all without the out of tree driver).
More interresting is going to be how the mainline drivers run which should be coming with kernel 7.2.
I did some testing on a mainline 7.2 build but no power testing, plug and play works and so does 5Gbit but for 10gbit we are still missing firmware that has as far as I can tell not been provided upstream.
In my experience the out of tree driver performs well but it also caused a bunch of hard crashes which is why I stopped using it and am just waiting for mainline support now.
And to update this, took 2 Days and i got the first kernel panic with the custom driver.
Guess waiting for a more solid driver in kernel it is. Speed over stability is a bad tradeoff.
I was just trying out my 10G expansion card on my FW13pro (Intel), and it works great on Arch Linux with the 7.2.3 kernel. It took me forever to find, but if you want to get the firmware, there is a utility to extract it from the Realtek driver into the format needed by the 7.2+ kernel here:
I have used that successfully with my system to get 10Gig bidirectionally with iperf3. It seems to work really well. It does get a bit warm, so keep an eye on it.
I also used this but I get pretty inconsistent performance with an 10gbit link (vs the out of tree driver). Are you on a platform with 20gbit usb ports?
