The announcement of the FW13 Pro is awesome. I’m really glad to see the company really dialing in a sleek and light option for professionals that’ll give them Frameworks legendary modularity and repairability.
But now I gotta ask, when might we see something for the other side of the spectrum? I still like my Framework 16. But I wish I had the option for way more power. Like… way more. Thermal throttling kicks in after just half an hour of light gaming. The next generation of parts should give us some good upgrades. But I cant imagine we’ll be able to push much more power through the machine without thermals causing further headaches. I require portability from my computer and I’d like to be able to throw games and workloads at it with confidence. So when might there be a product for somebody like me? I cant be the only person willing to put up with a heavier and bulkier package for better thermals and more potential power. Not a 16 Pro but a 16 workstation.
(I’m sticking with AMD since I use Linux and I prefer it when things just work. I know Nvidia drivers aren’t a huge deal and blah blah blah but thats a different topic. I’m aware that the 5070 module would be a big boost over the current Radeon one but Frameworks engineers had to work some serious magic for a mobile GPU that isnt even that impressive anyway. But who knows? Hopefully the next generation of modules can just be that good.)
You said thermal throttling kicks in after a half hour of light gaming. Do you have the PTM7958 thermal pad solution installed on your 7040 series mainboard?
Again, thanks. But I’m really not looking to troubleshoot this. My definition of “light gaming” is probably different than most other peoples.
I dont want a fix for what I have now. I want a permanent fix. I know a desktop killer will never fit in this form factor but when the next generation of parts rolls around I want 16gb of VRAM running ice cold with okay clock speeds.
Some cheeky rounds of minesweeper while I render 4k videos and run a few virtual machines. I’d like to start training my own LLM too but this damn thing is bottlenecking me.
(Any game thats over 5 years old in 1440p with medium-high settings.)
Hah, gotcha, sounds like a different use case for sure. I wonder if you could design a GPU module case that would support a big heat sink out the back or liquid cooling to allow overclocking… I’d certainly like something pulling the heat out of the case better so the keyboard or base of the case didn’t get so hot. Maybe something combo CNC and 3d printed since they provide the cad files on github?
The current Framework 16 should, in theory, never throttle. When all of the cooling system parts are working as intended it should be able to dissipate all waste heat when running at full power (~45W) indefinitely.
If it is throttling after half an hour, something is wrong.
Many batches were created with (now) known problematic thermal bonding for the heatsinks on the APU and less than ideal bonding for the GPUs. Look into the the copper shim PTM mod for the APU and PTM/full heatsink replacement for the DGPU.
Default fan curve might need to be adjusted if they don’t go high enough and it’s thermally throttling after the above problem is solved.
There are a few a power state issues, try to keep an eye on the CPU frequency and see if it get stuck at 544hz, or if there are rapid spikes and clamps indicating maybe a battery flipping issue, or if it works better on a 180W or 240W charger (if you’re using something like a 100W or 140W).
The fans will get somewhat easily clogged with dust/hair, it is truly worth investigating if it’s overheating.
Finally, some models of RAM will overheat in a subtle way unless you take steps to actively cool them, if your APU temperatures have no per core hotspots and are under 90C, it might be worth a shot to add thermal pads.