I’ve been spending the better part of a year and a half fighting with my Framework 16’s dGPU. From shitty substandard performance, 80fps but 15 fps lows constantly, (this cleared up with a bunch of DDU and driver install + Mainboard resets). To more recently, having God awful crashing and burning driver issues. The GPU actually straight up gives up and disconnects itself and reconnects itself. I have a screenshot of GPU 14 in task manager because of this. And when it does it the system borks and lags and often games just crash.
When I got the 16, I knew what I was getting right I was getting lower specs for a high price because with it I’d get the ability to upgrade my laptop. But with these God awful issues and support basically giving me the run around with test after test after test with basically no idea what I’m actually doing all of it for. Please.
I paid good money for this system but it’s been so bloody frustrating. I just want it to work. Poorer performance I can live with. I basically can’t play any of the games I own in peace
I feel you my friend. I had a lot of software issues with my Framework 16. If you have another SSD liying around or a Storage Expansion Card (I have the 256GB), it might be worth a try to install Windows 11 fresh on the spare SSD or the ExCard and sede if the crashes persist.
With the MUX and all the modular hardware, old/unfresh installation of Windows11 makes it unstable.
If you can play without problems on the new install, maybe it’s worth to hard reset alla software with a fresh start
I ended up writing a custom EC firmware that allowed users to play games without stutter.
Summary of the problem:
The psu is 180W. While playing a games, the cpu/gpu can draw far more than 180W. It can peak at about 450W.
When going above 180W (ish) it draws the excess from the battery.
When the battery gets lower, it tries to charge the battery. The battery charging has two effects.
the cpu/gpu cannot draw any excess from the battery while the battery charges.
the 180W psu power has 80W diverted to charging the battery, leaving only 100W for games.
the cpu/gpu throttles, resulting it games stutter.
My EC changes simply allow the user better control over when the battery charges, so can ensure it does not charge during a games.
Unfortunately, FW made no attempts to engage with us, to find how best to include my EC changes and improvements into their official BIOS releases, so users like you are left without a solution unless they are adventurous and use my EC firmware.
I’m not entirely sure because I’m using a 240w brick right now and getting these issues. I cleaned out my fans and the crashing has stopped but still getting driver timeouts
So cleaning out the fans and the crashing has stopped says something has been cooked repeatedly.
Consider getting an external GPU and a USB4 connection to the machine. This may not be the ideal setup; though if it means games can be played without issue that would be worth my time personally to not deal with an issue for over 12 months.
