My question is, what constitutes heavy load here? Is it a specific kind of game, or will running Visual Studio push it past it’s limits too? Also, and I mean no disrespect, but 240W adapters don’t exist, so how is anyone going to ‘bring their own’? I can’t even find a company that lists it as ‘coming soon’. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the product and have already pre-ordered (Batch 7), but it would ease my mind a little if I knew what constraints 180W puts on the device (with the upgraded graphics module). I’m not an electrical engineer, so I could use some help putting it in more relative terms that my tiny ape-brain can understand.
Cheers! …and thank you in advance.
The CPU alone cannot consume enough power to make the whole system exceed 180W (the 7940HS is limited to around 54W by AMD, Framework’s configuration might be lower), so you don’t have to worry about running into this with Visual Studio. Even if you did run everything on the dGPU instead of the iGPU, you’d have to put an actual load on the dGPU to make to consume enough power to exceed 180W (according to AMD, the GPU can consume up to 100W under load).
240W adapters are not available now, but they will be. It’s a finished USB standard. As with all new standards, it takes time for chipmakers to create purpose-built (low cost) chips to support it, and then for product manufacturers to create products around the chips.
Keep in mind that the Framework-16 is not out yet. It seems to be one of the first laptops supporting USB-PD at 240W. Would you rather it not support the new standard, and be left behind? The current available configurations of the Framework-16 do not require 240W, this is for the future, when there are more power hungry GPU modules.
To clarify, the FW16 comes with a 180W power supply, but the system can support a third-party 240W supply? How come Framework doesn’t sell a 240W supply?
This is partially untrue by my understanding, the current GPU will use more power than the cable provides at heavy loads thus taking from the battery while in use. I still agree with the decision to use USB-C though and not to wait until they can get a 240W charger out to customers.
It’s not a certain game, it’s running synthetic benchmarks on cpu and gpu. Or doing something like scientific calculations. If this is a problem for you, you probably need an actual workstation anyway
Edit: I misinterpreted the claim from framework and wrongly assumed the +180W power draw cannot be achieved by the current config.
The reason framework makes a 180W PSU right now, is that the current configs don’t need more power. You can load up your computer as much as you want, but you won’t exceed the 180W at all. They do however support the full USB-PD standard up to 240W in case they or anyone else wants to develop a GPU module, that uses more power than the current one.
Same thing abou the CPU, maybe next generation, the CPUs need a bit more power, well now they don’t need to redesign everything and you only need to buy the things you need.
And I guess they didn’t go for the full 240W on the charger, since that would make it
It seems like you didn’t read his post. He quotes Framework, where they say that it can indeed exceed 180W with the dGPU, if you push it.
Here:
But in most cases it will be fine. Even loads that hit over 180W would be ok, as long as you don’t expect it to do that indefinitely with no chance to recover. If you do insist upon running max load indefinitely, then you may need to get an AC adapter that provides more.
I always interpreted that as only being able to happen if you were to use a more powerful graphics module than the 7700S and them just having the option for you to use your battery is a backup.
But I guess I interpreted that wrongly. So sorry for the misinformation. It would be interesting to see how the laptop would actually dissipate 180W (or potentially more) as heat continuously though.
You’re basically describing building a 240W USB-PD power supply. I don’t think the 240W controller chips are available, at least in small quantities for hobbyists yet.
The controller ICs don’t exist yet. The newest, highest power one is 180W…which is what Framework is using. This is actually the world’s first 180W USB PD power supply.
IIRC Framework shared at one point that the 180W power brick actually uses chips that support 240W PD but Framework limited it to 180W to keep the charger compact. So the ICs do exist.
