I saw the thread regarding that the 180W charger sometime cannot keep up with the power draw of the system under certain conditions. I’ve experienced this myself and a thought crossed my mind. The machine has 4 ports which support 240W charging, if I had one of those multiport charging hub/docks which can supply more than 240W distributed over multiple ports, could I plug multiple cables from said dock into the charging ports on the FW16 and achieve 240W charging? Or would this not work for one reason or another?
I don’t currently have one of these docks, but I’ve entertained getting one for this purpose (at least until a singular 240W charging is available) but figured I would check if it would be a waste or not.
I presume those docks use a single power supply and just pass it to the laptop over multiple cables. Not multiple power supplies, which is a whole different matter and seems very difficult to do with modern switch-mode power supplies. Someone mentioned a laptop that could do the latter, but when I searched it, I just found a pile of user reports saying it often didn’t work.
But even if you had such a large single power supply, passing it over multiple cables I believe can only be done with a proprietary setup, not standard USB-PD.
The dell docks do indeed use a single power supply but you would still need to make sure the current is evenly split between the cables if you don’t want a 5090 power connector situation. So in that regard 2 separate power supplies would actually be better.
It could probably be done but it would probably need a dedicated power mux.
I am not entirely sure if this is part of the pd spec but all my pd chargers droop the voltage a bit before hitting their current limit which means we probably would not need active balancing or muxing. Still probably good idea to have a separate power mux.
The main issue would be the much increased complexity in the pd controller especially if it needs to be synced over multiple. The circuitry already prevents current flow in the wrong direction and pd chargers are required to have ocp so the main problems would be it just not working very well and being extremely complex. Given framework seems to be struggling (assuming they are even trying) getting the much less complex (but still more complex than most other laptops) setup they have currently to work reliably this does not sound realistic.
There is a FW response somewhere.
Only one PSU can be plugged in and supply power to the FW laptop at a time.
If you plug in more PSU, it only takes power from one of them.
Is over current protection really required by the PD spec? I feel like I’ve heard of too many power supplies that seem to lack it, reportedly behaving in bad ways, from overheating to just dropping voltage endlessly instead of ever cutting power. Good to know that these are actually violating the spec.