The nature/use of the six ports is described in one of the framework documents but only in a graphical form.
Sorry, I don’t have a link handy.
Could I ask which of the six ports can be charged from and if there are any other important differences between the ports I should know about?
Very many thanks.
left rear, left middle, right rear, and right middle support charging
left rear and right rear are the only usb4 ports. connected usb-a expansion cards have a higher power consumption (i think its just idle consumption) when connected to these. all other ports are usb3.2
left rear, left middle, and right rear support displayport alt mode (display output). if you have the dgpu, middle rear (the usb c port on the dgpu) also supports this (NOTE: no such port is present on the expansion bay shell), as well as usb2 (the bare minimum mandated by the spec to then be able to get display output)
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Hi David,
I’ll try to describe the differences as much as possible and share the feedback with the teams so that we can include the same information in the text form in this knowledge base article.
The Framework Laptop 16 has 6 slots for Expansion Cards and is fully compatible with all Framework Expansion Cards already available for the the Framework Laptop 13 however the functionality is not identical across all 6 slots.
The left rear port (the port on the left side closest to the expansion bay) has USB4, Display output, 240W charging, and USB A (marked as high power consumption).
The left middle port has USB3.2, Display output, 240W charging, and USB A.
The left front one (the port on the left side closest to you) has USB 3.2 and USB A.
The right rear port (the port on the right side closest to the expansion bay) has USB4, Display output, 240W charging, and USB A (marked as high power consumption), identical to the left rear port.
The right middle port has USB3.2, 240W charging, and USB A. This is not identical to the left middle port as it does not support display output.
The right front one (the port on the right side closest to you) has USB 3.2 and USB A, identical to the left front port.
The audio jack expansion card should work on all of them.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
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Very very many thanks to you both.
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You wrote that the right middle port has display output, but has no display output - probably copy and paste error.
thank you, you are absolutely right, I must have made a copy paste error. right middle port does not have display output, that’s why it’s not identical to the left middle one. fixed my original message.
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Also of note: the 3 non-DP capable ports share all their bandwidth as they come off of a single USB3 10G hub.
I think specifying the USB version a bit more would be helpful since the USB naming scheme is already pretty confusing. USB 3.2 unfortunately still doesn’t tell us much.