I took advantage of FrameWork’s recent offer to purchase a 11th gen motherboard. I bought the i5 and a CoolerMaster enclosure.
However, I’m having serious problems with it.
From the start I have trouble with the USB ports. Every time the system boots, it’s a roll of the dice on which USB ports will be functional. Sometimes I get lucky and all 4 work. But usually just 1 or 2 work. During one of the times all 4 ports worked I went ahead and installed Windows 11 and also the FrameWork 11th gen drivers. I hoped once the drivers were installed the system would work. But, things are still the same.
I tried going to the BIOS and setting everything to “default settings” in the hope that there was some invalid settings. I tried moving the expansion cards around to various ports to see if that improved anything. I can actually make it fail every time if I put the FrameWork Ethernet card in the upper right USB slot - go figure?
I’m still waiting for FrameWork support to contact me back.
Anyone have any ideas? I am leaning towards this is a defective board. Specially since Framework stated in their announcement that these were “found boards” and were in various states of assembly.
For what it’s worth, from my own experience and my sense of what I see on these boards, FW support has been diligent and skillful in working with customers whose devices have issues. I imagine they will request some additional relevant information, and if it is as before we’ll likely see any lessons learned here as well.
Just some hopefully reassuring words from a satisfied customer
I need at least 3 working USB ports to get a working system (power, HDMI Expansion card and keyb/mouse). It took me about a dozen reboots to get 3 ports working. But, I downloaded the 3.19 and ran it. Unfortunately the install fails because it fails to detect the battery. It says to “connect system battery” and then closes the app.
Yes, I have “Battery Disconnect” enabled in the (3.17) BIOS.
BIOS update is not intended to run when the mainboard is not connected to a battery. There should be a thread here or something in the knowledge base that explains how to update the mainboard without a battery.
Thanks for your suggestion. But that didn’t help. One guy in the post loaded an “EC Image” in Linux to get around this. I’m running Windows and have no idea what an EC Image is. Then at the end of the thread this is stated:
.. does already include an option to work a Framework Motherboard in “Standalone mode” which will skip the check for batteries etc on startup - however, I think this only works in regard to onboard diagnostic for the startup sequence - not gives a new route for the BIOS update yet. But maybe a step in the right direction so that we can get an easier update cycle soonish*
I even did a dump of the BIOS updater’s command lines to see if there was some kind of a “no battery” command line switch. But nothing there either
At this point I just want to return this for a refund ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Not sure what all that is but the instructions are clear on the post on what you need to do in Windows to perform the bios update. If you’re not up to it, you can just return it.
OK, my mistake. I missed the section where he describes extracting the installer and modifying the platform.ini file. Interestingly he also states that it’s important that the system be powered on with the left hand USB ports.
That’s too bad - because when I power it from the left ports all of the right ports are always dead. Like I mentioned earlier I need 3 USB ports to have just basic functionality. So, I’m still completely stuck.