Great deep dive! Shame that 240W chargers are not available yet, but it's definitely forward looking on FW part to be USB-C only and not some random proprietary connector that would be obsolete by next year.
@@amazinganticschannel not really, it just needs to be made first and that work could only be started after the PD 3.1 standard was finalized. once that was done every focused on the lower end of the standard first because thats where most of the demand is gonna be and most sales are going to happen.
As a note on power consumption: I got a package power out of my Ryzen 7 on my fw16 around 100w (including integrated GPU) pretty frequently while gaming. This was rather shocking to me. After dialing some power settings back on the integrated GPU (via Radeon control panel) I got the battery drain down to 10% per hour and that package power down to ~50watts. I haven’t played with anything other than the high performance power profile yet. Thanks for the video! Edit: I have and was using the dedicated GPU module when getting that power usage. I had spikes of 220w total power draw until i tuned the integrated GPU settings. Its like sometimes it’s not using the mux correctly (windows) and I think is going to be a significant issue on Linux as the mux won’t work there and requires both GPUs to be used to play on the integrated screen. P.S. it’s great to have another fw16 owner in CO.
No. Most frameworks are sold as diy kits, without an OS or storage. They have no way to tweak that, and for the fw16s without the dedicated GPU you want that power usage to have a good experience at all. All of that is ultimately driver and software controlled by AMD, not framework. I’ll note that this is one of the few AMD advantage laptops gaining popular traction and as such people are learning the software and power side. The USB C power is also a standard that framework is the first to use 180+w piece of, so there is a learning and development curve there as well. Its much easier to use a proprietary barrel jack for 150+watts than USB-C.
Interesting. It's great that they don't limit package power but for battery use it should be limited to 35W, and there should be a failsafe system that ensures that the device doesn't consume more that the charger is capable of.
Awesome, really happy to see this isn’t as negative as I was expecting, plus a lot of great tips. I just got my Batch 7 yesterday, and it is really good to see how I can better put my machine to use.
Wonderful video. I really appreciate all the work you do on these and your other videos. Your channel is definitely becoming one of my go to sources for info and reviews.
@ElevatedSystems - great content as always. This matches exactly what I had found in my testing with Fedora 39 as well. What I do personally, if I get into a heavy drop in Helldivers 2 - I may kick it into performance mode to keep the 1% lows happy. Something else I noticed - I played Forza Horizon 5 for about 3 hours last night and even in performance mode, the fans stayed fairly quiet and the temps were super cool. Have you noticed that as you run through cycles of heat/cool that the CPU temps seem to get better over time? I know people say that the "break in" for liquid metal is BS.. and maybe its just placebo.. but I am not running nearly as hot as I was the first couple of days. (batch 5 btw)
The liquid metal framework uses is semi solid at room temp, however the "break-in" is only a matter of seconds for it to liquify and hit it max thermal conductivity.
Interesting discussion. Love your stuff. I just got my wife's. I have the issue of the mouse pad and space holders not locking in as tightly as I wanted but not a dealbreaker and she can work on a potato basically so I am loving the fact when 5+ years from now it develops some silly little issue like the S key not working I can just replace 1 part instead of adding it to the stack of derelict laptops we have that I don't know what to do with
I actually find it commendable that Framework is letting their Laptop(s) run unencumbered, if you choose to do so. Usually laptop makers severely limit the power draw due to lack of cooling and lack of power delivery and it's difficult to circumvent that.
Framework is still in the top 3 for consideration for my next laptop (within a couple years), but it does look like they have a few things to hammer out still. Hopefully they'll be ready for me by the time I am for them!
Your findings on performance efficiency and seeking out the sweetspot is a big part of the reason ARM based laptops are all the rage right now. Because as fun as it is pushing the envelope when it comes to raw performance, higher effeciency means lower heat and less battery drain. The ARM SoC integrated architecture with discrete silicon designed for specific tasks allows machines with smaller form factors to push well above their weight class still while being usable on battery. That's not to say there isn't perfectly valid usecases for building machines that push the physics to its limits, but there's a reason you wouldn't put a V12 in a Toyota Prius. Good engineering is informed by all aspects of an objects design, not just the raw numbers.
For me thats really good quotes for the battery while charging and nearly full load. My laptop at home loses battery from 100-10% in half an hour while plugged in.
Having the balanced power profile does make most sense, with the Performance being a nice option if you really need it. The thing is, having lower temperatures helps with efficiency too. Though at 100-200W levels and something like 5-7 degrees Celsius, it's probably a saving of an entire watt or so. Having the fans spin at 40% instead of 100% also reduces their power usage too, right ? Probabil by another half of watt or so. Oh, well, not something THAT impactful. In Windows, one nice thing (that I hope it's in Windows 11 too) is that you can also create custom profiles. It allows a good degree of tweaking, though not exact power limits (unfortunately). But you can certainly create a profile where the CPU uses less than 45W, if you know that the game/task does not need it as much. I can't wait for the Linux part. A bit sad that there's no Gentoo there, with a custom kernel and hand picked software and customized, including customizing the cpu and gpu limits and usage and clocks and such to have something minimal that's both performant and minimal+not-so-needy (like a WM instead of a DE). Though in order to make it effective, it would probably take a month to research and tweak it to (almost) perfection, unless somebody else already did it and documented it. Though how minimal and customized to have it is very subjctive. Dang it, I can't wait to be able to get a Framework myself.
I recently got my Framework 16 and haven't had any issues with power drain yet. Although, I haven't played any very demanding games yet. The only game I've played so far is MTG Arena. I don't play it on the highest settings either because I don't need or want to. I want the game to play quickly and smoothly. I also have my laptops run in balance mode to save battery life. When using the laptop for non-gaming tasks, the battery lasts for many hours. When gaming, the battery will only last a few hours before I need to plug in. The battery will fully charge even when I'm playing Arena for hours.
I think it is a good thing Framework went for this route. The other option was to power throttle the CPU, and then I'd encounter a similar issue as with my laptop, where when just the GPU is working, it can sustain 55W, but when the dGPU is active, the CPU power throttles to 23W-28W.
Great video! Also, won't the quick discharge / charge ruin the battery? Since it has high cycles when the battery is at high percentages already (even when you limit to 90%) ?
I hope the GNU/linux laptop market can finally be great. Maybe it will take a move to a totally new arm infrastructure. Sadly at the moment if you need a high end laptop with Unix capability nothing beats the MacBook for daily hassle free life. I say this as someone whose daily driver is a Thinkpad.
You can also use Battery Saver mode to force the iGPU even with the dGPU installed and without use of the Radeon software for those endurance gaming runs. It also sets the CPU/iGPU package power lower than the power that you showed in the video (I think it sets it to 35W) allowing for more than 1 hour of endurance on something easy like Risk of Rain Returns or Cassette Beasts and likely on Dave the Diver too. Also food for thought, one can take a short break after a two hour max power gaming session (~-60 charge at that point) of half an hour and get a fair bit of the battery life back. Full battery? Likely not, but probably enough to keep the gaming session going for a while longer. The charging speed increases as battery life decreases, so as the battery is depleted from gaming, one would get more and more battery life back in the same duration of break. It's certainly a compromise, but I hope most gamers are taking a bit of time to use the restroom and grab some snacks/a drink periodically which would help offset the power drain. Nice video! Keep up the good content.
Can the Framework 16 accept power from multiple USB C ports simultaneously? Would it be possible to plug in and actually utilize two 180w chargers or a different charger altogether?
For what it's worth, I usually will personally artificially frame rate cap, and/or undervolt my laptops for noise and temperature reasons, and a lot of those games were running at 80+ FPS when issue started popping up. Those are perfect for amd's dynamic frame rate cap solution to lower performance when idle, or in general. In the future if I deemed it necessary, or games weren't hitting whatever manual cap I assign, the 240w may be available by then, who knows? As a quick mention of not getting what you pay for, the only thing limiting the performance in this case is the power delivery under peak load which is external to the machine because literally nothing that can do it exists currently over type-c, and they chose to go with the open standard of USB PD 3.1 instead of some closed source power jack/brick like Lenovo or Alienware. Meanwhile, a max MacBook Air, performs orders of magnitude worse under load then it otherwise does and there is nothing you can do about it! The argument as I see it, is either you get hardware that is too powerful for power supplies that exist today but the expectation that they will appear as it uses a industry standard power delivery mechanism. Or, you ship weaker hardware that has no reason to even get a new power supply? From what I've seen, the 7700s in this notebook is only slightly slower than my 6800m Strix 15 AE machine, but Notebook to Notebook it draws about 80W more power than the 16 does with it's own 280w barrel jack. I also regularly run and game that strix off of USB PD 3.0 100w power supplies just fine. I suspect the power circuitry in the Asus is a bit more strict, as I've never had battery drain well using type c even with the level of hardware involved. Again to close, we already know that 240w USBC bricks are hard to make, otherwise one would have existed in the last THREE years the standard has been a thing. However, framework is the first company even approaching that number out of all of the other power companies that exist. UGreen and Anker only have 140w after all that time. If I didn't already have a notebook that performs similar to this, I would have already bought one. Hypermiling it for a few months until a new power supply comes out seems like a fair trade. It's not like you have to throw out the old power supply either because it's literally USBC! Anything else that can use up to a 180w brick can use it.
a 2+k laptop focused on modularity and repairability should offer CPU tuning options in BIOS just like any desktop computer. The biggest pitfall in most laptops with bad power consumption is wrong BIOS settings that are usually locked down + bad implementation of power plans
That is good news. Is the auto-undervolt feature available on the AMD software? I remember using that to reduce noise on my desktop 6700XT, but wasn't sure if it would work on mobile.
Looking forward to the Linux video. I'm getting fairly high temps and big swings on fan speeds even with the recommended fwfanctrl and ppd and want to make sure that nothing is wrong with the cooling on mine. No dgpu.
Has fw-fanctrl been properly ported to the FW16? In any case the default fan ramp times are really fast so the swings are very abrupt. What atemps are you seeing in what type of workloads?
How is the performance on battery? Is there much difference between being connected to the network and the battery? With battery can you play at the level of an asus rog ally?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the rapid charging and discharging is particularly bad for the battery. I understand that the batteries are readily swappable, but it still sounds really bad.
weird issue i noticed is i got a 140w charger, and it gimps the graphics to stay under that. as you said, the gpu will live around 100w with the 180w charger, well unplugged it'll run the integrated at about 30w. with my 140w charger itll have BOTH the integrated AND dedicated at around 20w. which makes dramatically worse framerates than even unplugged gets. wish i could figure out a way to fix that, i emailed framework and they havent helped at all. and the laptop is too new for much help from forums
I would limit the battery charging to 80 or at least 90 anyway, at least on a laptop that will spend most of its life plugged into the wall than free floating
I wonder how much bigger a 210w charger would have been? I know every added watt is a hit to the small form factor, but I can't help but imagine that it couldn't be terribly different to design a charger fit for the device?
This sounds like poor communication from Framework. Maybe if they "locked" the maximum performance in BIOS and let you enable it with warning about draining battery, it would not cause this much of a clash-back.
To be fair, Framework never marketed this as a gaming laptop, on the contrary. What other tasks, besides gaming, will run for many hours - long enough to deplete the battery?
@@ElevatedSystems Literally everything a power user would want from a larger 16 inch desktop with discrete GPU at these prices. Otherwise, better to get the 13....
Puget Systems explain why a laptop isn't expected to be the same as a workstation for heavy duty processing. Power consumption and heat dissipation are limitations on laptops. The blanket doesn't cover head and feet simultaneously. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tCv3vP6LxAs.html
@@zakit just watched and this does noes not cover the case of utilizing the battery to cover the additional wattage needed. I understand the performance statistics being lowered when we’re on battery, but while plugged in is unacceptable.
None of those are 300W on a single cable. Those are all multiple port chargers with max single port charging of between 100 and 140W. A 240W USB IC hasn't been made yet therefore a 240w USB-PD charger can't be made yet.
My problem is, that if it already struggles so much in terms of heat and charging, after years of degrading, it would arguably be worse. Im rly rly wondering if I should cancel my preorder.
Fluid motion frame generation is driver based frame generation that can work on any game on specific graphics API (I believe it is DirectX11 and 12). Then there is also FSR frame generation that has to be implemented by the game. Which has better visual quality than fluid motion frame (can be used with any upscaler in the latest version, not that matters for the GPU for Framework 16 currently since it is all AMD). I would presume Hell Divers 2 and Cyberpunk are using FSR and not AFMF. Frame generation doesnt improve latency like typical increase in frame rate does so it isn’t useful for competitive games where the point of ultra high frame rates is lowest latency as possible. Then in graphical demanding games it can be nice to have smoother frame change by the added frames from frame generation. Nvidia reflex and AMD anti lag can improve latency without frame generation as well, so they are not something you can only use with frame generation. Anyway great deep dive otherwise. I do wonder if U series fits the power draw of balanced H series, or if there is still some increased power (and performance) from H series.
@@ElevatedSystems FSR has an upscaler and frame generation. The current upscaler was released with FSR 2 (where FSR 1 upscaler didn't need to be implemented in game just like AFMF) and frame generation was released with FSR 3. I believe FSR 3.1 has updates to both the upscaler and frame generation where 3.0 just implemented frame generation and used the latest 2.x upscaler (so some games with FSR frame generation might still say FSR 2.x when selecting upscaling). As I have said I would think you used FSR frame generation in those two games (along with FSR upscaler). Since the difference in your experience sounds like the difference between AFMF and FSR frame generation and those two games have implemented FSR frame generation unlike the other games. I dunno if turning on AFMF then turns on FSR frame generation if available for the game since it is better than AFMF.
oh I see I plugged in the framework charger and now the fan % is increasing and framerate increasing. I was just using the power from the dell usb-c dock
@@knipp30 wait are you saying the system doesn’t have a standard power supply port like normal laptops and instead uses a usb c port for power ? If so that’s crazy and doesn’t make much sense sense as why they couldn’t include a standard power port on the machine !
@@HaloinfiniteEternal This has been addressed a few times if you follow Framework. But this does a few things - reduces e-waste, has a standard port that is NOT proprietary, and uses the USB C standard for all ports without having to create another one on the frame. I use mine for gaming and it works just as well as my lenovo gaming laptop.
Thanks @Elevated Systems this was a good one. The first iPad Pro came with a 12W charger which resulted in the same issue. With a laptop however I find this to be unacceptable. I would use this plugged into my dual monitor desktop set-up, and as a workstation at that. Imagine having to worry about battery life when it's plugged in. Yes I understand your solution, but should a laptop with repairable credentials be able to work without a battery connected? Couldn't you re-purpose the Framework 13 motherboard as a desktop without battery?
@@knipp30 Interesting. So when it gets to 20% it will down-clock automatically until it gets back to 100%? And also, when you need to leave the office for a meeting, it could be as low as 20% after having been plugged in all day? And how about my question on repurposing the motherboard? Perhaps at that point it would need to have a 240 W adapter?
@@ryanswatson " Interesting. So when it gets to 20% it will down-clock automatically until it gets back to 100%?" I am not sure - Ive never used it long enough to hit that point. You have to remember, you have to max out the CPU and the GPU for close to 8 hours before it hits 20%. "And also, when you need to leave the office for a meeting, it could be as low as 20% after having been plugged in all day?" Highly doubtful, unless you spend your entire 9 hour shift playing helldivers 2 on "performance" setting "And how about my question on repurposing the motherboard? Perhaps at that point it would need to have a 240 W adapter?" When we get to the point that someone decides to do that, I am sure they could come up with a way to power the GPU externally. I think you are missing the point that this ONLY occurs when in "Performance mode" and when both the CPU and GPU are pulling their max ratings. It doesnt just drain randomly.
@@knipp30 thank you kindly for your reply. And I do understand the concept, and the high likelihood that in my case there would be very little pulling from the battery when plugged in. But what I mention are reasonable questions and assumptions for power users who bought the thing with a potential use case in mind. I personally wouldn’t like to think that if I had it running on my workstation setup, that the battery would need to be pulled from at all, even if it’s only hitting those types of workloads for 10 out of 60 minutes per hour. I would personally pick up a 240w adapter as soon as it’s released, and not be too happy with the situation until I got a solution in place. The good thing is that there are solutions for these problems down the road, and doubt that Framework wouldn’t offer solutions (even if they do come at additional expense).
Possible nature of "scrum" like decisions for meeting deadlines. All I want to know is if I can request for a free 240watt power supply/adapter later in the future.
Hey CJ have you tried running this with the 300W ugreen charger? Apparently it supports 240W per usb-c cable and could fix this issue. That being said it is bulkier so maybe not the most portable thing.
@@jessebraughler8594 I believe the relevant specifications/standards for USB PD only allow for the options of supporting 60W, 100W, or 240W. 60W is supported by any cable, 100W or 240W requires the cable to contain a chip that signals to the devices it connects to that it can safely handle the relevant higher voltages. So any use case of >100W will *need* to use cables that support up to 240W.
Okay i see why you would test on Best performance but i have my framework on Balanced just for the reduction in noise. But thanks for getting the numbers.
@@k_____________________ yes I know just wanted to say thx. I did not spend a lot of time benchmarking different games to see the difference. I just used my Framework and came to the conclusion that I don't notice a big difference. Especially in Hunt Showdown and Call of Duty. Like with my Lenovo Legion.
You're telling me that Android phones have befier chargers than highend laptops? 😂 How is an entire industry incapable of implementing a standard that can deliver more than 120W on USB is beyond me.
@@blackhorseteck8381 the most I’m seeing is 30-45 watt chargers, the framework 16 has a 180 watt charger. Seriously what phone is using a higher charger? You comment is confusing
@@jitterrypokery1526 You might be in North America where Samsung is the default Android device, other markets have more diversity and see phones with 150+ watts chargers (some going up to 240w). A quick Google/ChatGPT search will clear any confusions.
it's not $3k and it can handle max performance for a little while. Also FW is probably coming out with a 240W charger. Furthermore, if you're looking for bang for your buck FW clearly isn't it everyone has different needs and priorites when buying a laptop.
@bennettderrico5845 I'm sorry but they designed a system where the hardware specs take more wattage than the power input? If it's just a power unit that is not user serviceable, they could have outsourced it to someone who had the capacity to build it instead of delivering the 16 without power. I'm sick of sub-par premium products becoming the norm: Tesla (don't have personal experience, but that seems to be some people's experience), Google Pixels, and Framework 16. The problem is me. I still have my batch 11 order pending. What is wrong with me? I'll be waiting almost a year for a defective/beta product that's priced really high. There's no ROI for being a guinea pig for Framework's beta test. All I get is a shell, modular components that are rough around the edges, and an underpowered power supply * that I'll have to pay to upgrade * in the future if they have a better one ... assuming they don't fail, in which case all that modularity comes to naught. I have similar feels as I did when I bought crypto during the run-up just before the 2022 crash (at least that sorta evened out in the end but what a terrible decision). Don't do as I do. Buy something reliable, or invest in something risky with potential returns, but don't park your money in a substandard consumable.😢
Would you rather Framework wait until the end of the year and then release it with the 240w brick? I'll take the 5090 running faster than the 4090 right now and just needing a new cable for max performance, instead of waiting a year.
Like BennettDerrico said, not true. Linus certainly helped, but given its mission, most would've been the same about it. Also, not everybody likes Linus, so it goes both ways.
Have to agree a bit. Not just Linus but Josh and everyone giving it favorable reviews. Love can’t keep a business afloat. I will buy one if they’re around in 4 years.
@@GlassblowingBusiness-jq8te They seem to be doing well I mean they've released 4 generations of laptops/mainboards and whenever a new generation gets released for preorder they sell quickly. Furthermore, they wouldn't have released the 16 inch model if they weren't doing well! I have an AMD 13 and love it!
@@Winnetou17 I think the mission is great but they now have a responsibility to deliver a decent experience, big tech will look at this closely and if it flops they won’t pivot their business. if it’s a success they will. Sometimes it’s about getting the basics right
How is the performance on battery? Is there much difference between being connected to the network and the battery? With battery can you play at the level of an asus rog ally?
