The freeze happened again. This time I had a roughly 6 foot 4” cable (while it looked to be the same type of cord that I was using before, simply longer, Its the cord my brother has been using on his egpu set up for a year now so it should be good).
Instead of unplugging the GPU, this time I turned the GPU off first, and the laptop gave me a blue screen instead.
Ok so update. Whenever I have Rocket League running it doesn’t crash, soooooo, if I leave rocket league running, and just put the window mostly off the bottom of the screen, I don’t have any issues. I think this applies to any program that requires some graphics power, but, I have a hacky solution and am happy (would still love to get to the bottom of the issue though)
Very interesting… One other thing that would be interesting to test if it fits is plugging one of the cables directly into the laptop, rather than through the USB-C Expansion Card. That would help to determine if this is a signal issue or a software compatibility issue.
laptop with discrete cards usually needs a good cooling system. So, the fan can’t get too loud and get toasty. So, many manufacturers solve this by soldered the memory/storage parts to save spaces and I hope framework with modular laptop philosophy can solve the issue without soldered important parts
Thanks for all the attempts! The bad news is that it is still crashing, but the good news is that it seems like it may be a solvable driver or firmware issue rather than something in the hardware setup. We’ll try to replicate it on our side.
I also want to ask about the possibility of a discrete card. I don’t want to have to carry external gpu so are there any plans for a thicker version with GPU?
@FaultedBeing I had crashes with my ASRock NUC Box 1165-g7 + eGPU early on. In my case, the system stablized after I set the fan curve to be more aggressive in the bios
(System Auto → Auto w/ Target Temp 50C & Fan Target of 3) and updated thunderbolt drivers; you might try messing around with those to see if it helps.
Another thing is to try powering your machine off wall power vs eGPU PD, see if that makes a difference.
That fan curve suggestion might be the reason constantly running a program like rocket league prevents crashes (although task manager (and another cpu temp software) never showed any high usage/temps at the time or crash ). I imagine there’s still a software element to help fix it, but I’ll try it in the meantime, thanks!
I used to have the same issue with crashing on both a Razer Blade Stealth 13 and a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, both with the i7-1065g7. I use a 2070 Super in my Razer Core X.
I was able to fix it by going into the NVIDIA Control Panel, then Manage 3D Settings, and then set “Power management mode” to “Prefer maxiumum performance”.
Afterwards, I stopped getting the periodic crashes on both laptops. I believe this should also work for the Framework Laptop, though I can’t say for certain since I don’t have my hands on one yet.
For anyone testing eGPU, I would love to see how eGPU performance is when using the mobile display. I understand that when reviews first came out that the limitation on performance was mostly due to limited bandwidth on Thunderbolt 3 ports, but if this is truly USB 4 then I would expect the performance impact to be less than what was tested years ago.
It sounds like there are a lot of people who are suggesting expansion enclosures off of thunderbolt. Products like One Stop System’s ExpressBox 3T-V3-eGPU.
While I think this could certainly work, I’m not sure that this is the most portable solution. Imagine lugging that thing to school or using that to play games on your train ride home. Not to mention, there are a lot of electrical differences between the mobile GPU’s that are created for laptops and their desktop counterparts including how they throttle their power while idle. It really sounds like the question still stands if the frame developers are going to include a X16 PCIE lane to incorporate a modular PCIE mobile GPU. Does Frame plan on introducing a model like this in the future?
What I’d love to see is an alternative, thicker shell with extra internal space such that they could launch a dedicated GPU that sits above the main board and is connected by one of the thunderbolt ports
It would reduce the amount of mainboards they’d have to release, allow choosing GPU and CPU separately and have room for a bigger battery better suited for a laptop with a dedicated GPU; heck it might even be possible to just put two of the same standard battery, and even use the space for the GPU to instead add yet another battery to build an ultra-long lasting charge laptop for those who work on the field
(would still love to get to the bottom of the issue though)
). I imagine there’s still a software element to help fix it, but I’ll try it in the meantime, thanks!