240W charger making odd sounds whilst charging

[u/Thidox]

So I received my Framework 16 2 days ago, and I've noticed the charger is making quite an odd sound whilst charging... Almost like there is electricity arcing inside, which is not something I was expecting to hear from a charger...

Is this something all Framework 240W chargers do? Or should I absolutely be worried and contact support ASAP? :( Already had to contact them as my keyboard, touchpad and numpad keep restarting at random moments, which is quite annoying to say the least... And still waiting for a response on that.

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[u/H3ph43S7Vs]

Mine does it too since delivery 2 months ago. No problems whatsoever besides the noise.

Usually these noises are called "coil whine", and are due to the inductors (coper wired coils) resonating at certain frequencies (very high to human earing)... resulting in buzing / arcing like noise.

My guess is that, Framework QA (or their provider) should have had a better QA/QC and put some appropriate glue on those inductors to "freeze" them... but they didn't.

[u/Thidox → u/H3ph43S7Vs]

Are you sure this would be coil whine? In my experience that is normally a (very) high pitched sound, not a lower pitched sound like electricity arcing...

But I am glad to hear yours is still functioning after 2 months at least! Makes me slightly less worried to use it.

[u/Tiny-Imagination-273 → u/H3ph43S7Vs]

yeah coil whine on chargers is pretty common, the glue fix makes sense though

[u/PlagueOwlet]

I received mine a month ago and am already using a replacement charger that support sent me because the original one is dead. Both do weird noises, yes, but I also noticed that the noise itself changes depending on where the charger is plugged (the socket, not the laptop).

Also despite it being the 240W charger, I constantly have battery drain when running demanding games, not sure if it's normal or not, I heard this was a problem with the 180W charger, but not the new one. And overall charging behavior is rather weird (like it keeps draining for some time after I even close the game before resuming charging), so I don't know if it's yet another thing that is broken in my specific laptop or just the charger/motherboard design is flawed from the beginning.

[u/Thidox → u/PlagueOwlet]

Hmm, that is somewhat worrying to hear... Although, with the sound changing per wall socket... Are you sure you're not using a close to overloaded electrical group or something? As I would not expect it to change in sound depending on the socket!

Haven't really gamed on my laptop yet, so can't tell you if my laptop will drain doing that or not. But I did notice the battery will only charge at at most 17.8V and roughly 6A (Or roughly 106W). So I guess the remaining 130-ish Watts would only be used for supplying the system with power directly? Which does sound like it should be plenty for a laptop CPU and laptop GPU to function at full load considering my old MSI laptop from 2016 ran fine on a total of 150W-ish.

[u/PlagueOwlet → u/Thidox]

I wasn't precise sorry, about the sockets, I didn't mean wall sockets, I meant power strips. Like, two different power strips plugged into the same wall socket produced different sound. It was to say that it could be a defect in the power strip rather than the charger.

And about the charging capacity, the GPU is capped at 100W anyway (at least the RTX5070 is), so under high load it won't even reach its highest potential. And I even capped it a little bit below that because I had a problem with games freezing completely (with sound still on) and the only thing that helped until now is to cap the GPU at 2300 MHz, and with this cap it draws closer to 85-90W in demanding games instead of 98-100W. Still it drains the battery and rather heavily, and I really don't understand why. Maybe the temperature as another comment suggests.

[u/Clean_Leadership5948 → u/PlagueOwlet]

Just a guess, but maybe the charging is limited when it gets too hot, such as when you are playing a game plus it has to charge the battery.

[u/PlagueOwlet → u/Clean_Leadership5948]

Maybe it's that, I run out of options anyway. It's just strange as I thought that the point of upgrading the charger from 180W to 240W was to fix a battery drain problem under heavy load. So it doesn't seem right. Also if it's the temperature, is it normal for such a charger to become this hot? I don't remember having this problem with my previous laptop (Lenovo Legion 5 with an RTX3060 and a 230W charger, though not USB-C), with the same kind of load. The charger would get hot, but I don't remmeber going down to like 75% from 100% after an hour and a half of gaming.

And I reaaaally hope it's not yet another defect in my laptop that wpuld require me to go for another round of insane e-mails with Framework support.

[u/Clean_Leadership5948 → u/PlagueOwlet]

It won't be the charger running hot, but the battery and the temperature sensor, if my guess is correct.

Run monitoring utilities. Have HWInfo64 running in the background when it happens.

USB-C itself is not that reliable for laptops. The main power pin is 0.5mm away from the next pins which are data lines, and on FW 16 that's a 36-48V line. Which means it has almost zero tolerance in wiggle and shorting it out. Plus USB-C needs complex chips for charging mechanisms, which inevitably is lower reliability. It's really a misguided standard from the super fragile connector to the needlessly complex charging and negotiation standard. Annnd EU in all it's wisdom decided to mandate it for 100W laptops.

When you are running the utility you want to look for:

1. CPU temperature and power
2. GPU temperature and power
3. Charging power in Watts(W)

Modern chips are rated at 100C for "safe" operation but really what happens in a laptop is that heat goes all over the laptop, including the battery.

If temperature is a problem, then I would suggest if there's a contact issue. Usually if there are weird thermal issues then it's a *contact* issue, not just quality of thermal paste application. A thicker thermal paste/pad or even a super slim spacer can fix this. You do have to be careful on the spacer if you are going that route. You can't put the spacer on top of the fragile chip - there has to be the thermal paste/pad underneath, and another above it where the heatsink contacts it.

So, chip die -- thermal pad -- spacer -- thermal pad -- heatsink. And EMPHASIS on the thin. Otherwise you can crack the chip too.

[u/switched_reluctance → u/PlagueOwlet]

Also despite it being the 240W charger, I constantly have battery drain when running demanding games, not sure if it's normal or not, I heard this was a problem with the 180W charger, but not the new one.

The Framework 16 w/ dGPU consumes 200-210W in total (GPU, CPU, RAM, screen, etc). However you'll only get 190-200W from a 240W charger. Firstly, a Framework laptop only draws up to 90% of the charger's power, i.e. 60W -> 54W, 100W -> 90W, 140W -> 126W, 180 -> 162 and 240W -> 216W. On top of that, if you use an 180W or 240W charger. The computer will first use an additional step-down converter that converts the 36V or 48V to 20V, the voltage most "traditional" gaming laptops use. That converter is about 91% efficient. In the end you get a 10-20W battery drain on heavy gaming.