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Framework Laptop 2.5Gbps Ethernet Expansion Card
- spamizbad 4y agoWhat a slick little dongle. Much nicer than the awkward wired ones.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chadash 4y agoNice! Except I see that ethernet is a bit too large to fit the body, so this hangs a bit off of the side. Is there an advantage to this over an external ethernet to USB-C adapter (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Ethernet-Portable-1-Gigabit-Chromebook/dp/B00ZZ6NW5E https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Ethernet-Portable-1-Gigabit-Chr...)? These days, I find that when using my laptop at home, a decent USB-C hub/dock is pretty much a pre-requisite given the number of things I need to connect (for me, monitor + mouse + keyboard + webcam + webcam light) and many of these have ethernet adapters built in anyway (which I don't personally use since my WiFi is fast enough).
- xur17 4y agoThe framework one is 2.5Gbit/s vs 1Gbit/s for the Anker one you linked to.
- jelled 4y agoHere's a 2.5gb one: https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Ethernet-PowerExpand-Aluminum-Portable/dp/B097N5WJY9 https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Ethernet-PowerExpand-Aluminum-P.... Guessing there would be no difference since the Framework modules appear to connect to the chassis via USB-C.
- neathack 4y agoAnker offers a 2.5G adapter as well: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097N5WJY9/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097N5WJY9/
- stewbrew 4y agoThe Framework Expansion card essentially is an USB-C adapter but with the form factor of a framework extension card. I personally don't find the card very appealing. I thought Ethernet ports in thin laptops are a solved problem.
- jvanderbot 4y agoThey are! Unless you'd like it to be a USB A card occasionally. Or and SD reader. Or you would like to buy a laptop that lets you choose exactly what ports you want, with the power to change it any time. In that case, an expansion slot sounds nice.
- CoolGuySteve 4y agoI'm not a fan of having a such a large USB-C hub built into the laptop at all. This adapter shows the weird compromise where there is not enough space inside the laptop for a complicated adapter but a non-trivial amount of space inside the chassis is still being used. I'd much rather have more battery volume inside the computer with all the USB-C ports directly exposed and then have the option to carry around a USB-C dongle with the extra ports I might need.
- spockz 4y agoCould you have one of these slots filled with an usb-c battery? Then at least you keep modularity. But it not add space efficiënt probably as just extending the internal battery.
- andrewia 4y agoThen the Framework just isn't for you. The Framework was designed to be a portable laptop that is also modular and repairable. Apple's design philosophy seems to most closely match yours - only USB-C ports with separate dongles.
- CoolGuySteve 4y agoNot sure why you assume I don't want a repairable laptop or what some plastic USB-C port extenders have to do with modularity. Hiding a USB-C hub inside a laptop and calling it "modularity" seems pretty silly. Maybe if that hub connected to some kind of riser card PCI-E interface and was replaceable I'd take this modularity claim more seriously. At least then I'd be able to replace the whole contraption with NVMe slots, a GPU, 10GigE, etc.
- gwbas1c 4y ago> Is there an advantage to this over an external ethernet to USB-C adapter It's more securely attached to your laptop: You don't need to deal with it when you put your laptop in a backpack, or worry about losing it when you disconnect it.
- byefruit 4y agoA bit sad this is arriving just as I'm getting ready to return my 12th gen Framework. Really wanted to keep it but it arrived with a litany of quality control issues. Most of those are probably fixable with replacement parts but I don't think there's anything that can be done about the screen wobble. A laptop I can't actually use on my lap..
- linux_is_nice 4y agoThere's replacement hinges, and also a reinforced backplate!
- byefruit 4y agoThat's fine (and why I wanted to support Framework in the first place) but do you really expect to buy a new laptop and then have to purchase more parts just to make it work correctly?
- AdamJacobMuller 4y agoFor an experimental DIY product like Framework? I do, actually, and it's a large part of the reason why I haven't bought one despite thinking the overall project is a good idea.
- linux_is_nice 4y agohttps://community.frame.work/t/explainer-lid-rigidity-hinge-force-the-cnc-top-cover-and-the-new-4-0kg-hinge-kit/19157 https://community.frame.work/t/explainer-lid-rigidity-hinge-... > If you have a laptop where the lid angle drops on its own while the laptop is stationary, write into support with a video of it, and we’ll send you a new Hinge Kit. I think it should be covered by warranty :)
- byefruit 4y agoI actually think this is resonance they talk about in the last section rather than the hinges themselves. The angle at the bottom of the screen doesn't change, it's the top that flexes back and forward. Coupled with the reflective screen it makes focusing on the monitor really hard when it's on a mount to be at eye height (my Thinkpad and a Dell have no problems on the same mount).
- VyseofArcadia 4y agoAll I want from Framework is an ARM motherboard. It seems crazy to me that the only way to get a Linux ARM laptop that isn't essentially a Raspberry Pi (or equivalent) is to buy a Mac. I'd be happy to be wrong about this. If I am, please let me know where I can spend my money.
- bgorman 4y agoThere are plenty of Qualcomm based ARM laptops on the market.
- VyseofArcadia 4y agoI've looked, and all I've seen are jailbroken Chromebooks and Win 10 laptops that also need to be jailbroken and are missing drivers for important things like wifi and accelerated graphics.
- vel0city 4y agoTo be fair, buying an ARM Mac and running Linux on it doesn't come with drivers for accelerated graphics.
- DannyBee 4y agoThat is the state of non-server ARM in general on Linux. It requires mucking with device trees and what not on most SBC's, etc. Some of them kind of work. The likely OEM's the SOC for a laptop like this (rockchip, amlogic, etc) are mostly non-helpful. Though rockchip is getting upstream reasonably well now (IE you could probably build a mainline kernel that works). But honestly, I would expect a linux laptop built with any on-market ARM SOC to be a mess right now. There is actually one SBC vendor who runs linux in a container under the android kernel because the android kernel has much better ARM hardware support :) (which is probably right - most of the SOC's you'd put in a laptop are being built mainly for android based set top boxes, tablets, etc) It would take a couple iterations and dedicated work to get somewhere good.
- hackmiester 4y ago
- scrlk 4y agoWould be a good application for the folding RJ45 port as previously seen on Fujitsu Lifebooks: https://youtu.be/M7fcJM6iunA?t=125 https://youtu.be/M7fcJM6iunA?t=125
- Cyberdog 4y agoThere may be patent considerations, and at any rate those things look a lot more prone to breaking if someone trips over the cord.
- StephenSmith 4y agoRan them on fleet laptops. They broke. All. the. time.
- Spooky23 4y agoOne of my colleagues broke one when he fumbled an extra large gum ball.
- je_bailey 4y agoI believe they looked at them. The issue is essentially the expansion board that handles the processing of the 2.5Gbit/S and the port combined were larger than the space they had designated.
- pram 4y agoThe fact that it sticks out on the side made me realize these Framework dongles are basically neo-PCMCIA cards lol I wonder why there was never a standardized PCIE 'card' format? Seems like the perfect thing for extra storage with NVME being so common these days.
- jeffbee 4y agoThere was: ExpressCard. Nobody liked it.
- CharlesW 4y agoOh my gosh, no! Those of us who needed it did like it a lot, and PC Cards before it. But PCMCIA disbanded in 2009, ExpressCard 2.0 failed to catch fire, and USB got "good enough". And now it's apparently acceptable to parade around one's dongles in public.
- kube-system 4y agoMany PCMCIA/ExpressCard solutions also used dongles. Dongles are unsightly but USB-C/Thunderbolt with a dongle can really replace anything that an ExpressCard could do, and more.
- krolden 4y ago>Thunderbolt with a dongle can really replace anything that an ExpressCard could do, and more. What can tb do that express card could not?
- kube-system 4y agoBasically everything added to TB over its various revisions are things EC can't do because EC was discontinued. 12.5x the bandwidth? Sharing a port with USB? USB-PD out of the same connector?
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
- herpderperator 4y agoMixing 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps and 10Gbps has sort of been a nightmare for me on Mikrotik at least. My WAN port is 2.5Gbps and you would expect that I get full speed 112MB/s Internet on the 1Gbps LAN ports, but that only happens if I force the WAN port to negotiate at 1Gbps. If I leave it at 2.5Gbps, then I get something like 50MB/s instead, and it oscillates +- >20MB/s during the life of that TCP connection. I don't think it's entirely a Mikrotik issue as I believe this is just a physics thing - you're firing off one port at a certain speed so the buffer of the other port fills up too quickly unless the faster one slows down (resulting in excessive packet loss.) But it looks like Mikrotik has the most complaints about this. The solution appears to be to enable Flow Control, but it's never clear in which direction or which port it needs to be enabled on, and I haven't really had any success with any combination. [0] https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=182691 https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=182691 [1] https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=181881 https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=181881 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/mikrotik/comments/rq7ytu/rb5009_25gbe_slower_than_1gbe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mikrotik/comments/rq7ytu/rb5009_25g... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/mikrotik/comments/rza5u3/slow_multigigi_performance_on_rb5009/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mikrotik/comments/rza5u3/slow_multi...
- csunbird 4y agoI wonder, what is stopping people from buying a x64 PC with a good CPU, slapping multiple ethernet cards over pcie (which support amazing speeds, good enough for 10G) and installing openwrt/pfsense on it? This is something I really want to do, actually.
- arghwhat 4y agoCost, both from power consumption and purchase. Hard to compete in those fronts with a mikrotik or ubiquity router doing 1Gb/s through hardware offload with a tiny MIPS or ARM chip.
- zamadatix 4y agoSomewhere around HN there is a guy that did just this for the 25G internet to his home, full talk with slide deck and all. I think he wrote some custom Go code to simplify running it as well. In general though unless you need >10G you'll come behind on (good) COTS offerings in price and performance. Particularly if you need features like NAT or firewalling where software starts adding latency or performance cliffs at certain intervals while things like a low end Fortigate have high levels of hardware offload.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoI really hope that this form factor catches on. It's actually possible, since there's no chicken and egg problem -- this card can be used on any computer. It works better in a Framework laptop, but it's just another dongle on others. Hopefully a big manufacturer notices and starts using it.
- cesarb 4y ago> this card can be used on any computer. With the small caveat that you need enough space around the port; on other computers, it might block other nearby ports, or even not fit if there's any protuberance. Passive USB-C plug to USB-C socket cables (that is, USB-C "extension cords") are AFAIK forbidden by the standard (and ignoring the standard and making one anyway would, as far as I understand, allow for dangerous combinations like putting 5A into a 3A cable), so they cannot be used to workaround this limitation.
- comex 4y agoBut there are active USB-C extension cables, as well as hubs that connect with USB-C to the host and have at least one USB-C port to connect a device. Beyond that, forbidden as passive extension cables may be, there are dozens of brands selling them on Amazon, so they're always an option even if they create a potential misuse hazard.
- Bud 4y agoCongrats, you just doubled or tripled the cost just to make this kludge work.
- ZekeSulastin 4y agoPhysical compatibility aside, sticking a large rigid adapter supported only by the port into a laptop seems like a great way to damage the port and is still clunkier than a standard dongle with a cable.
- themerone 4y ago
- sschueller 4y agoI want a SFP28 slot. Then I can put it what I want/need.
- mmastrac 4y agoAt least in my experience, SFP-form-factor ports have been ridiculous in terms of the heat that they generate. They're flexible, yes, but power and thermal demands make them impractical for anything that isn't wired to A/C and blowing lots of air.
- coder543 4y ago10gig copper ethernet is hotter and more power hungry than the equivalent SFP+. Maybe you’re comparing a faster SFP port to a slower ethernet port? 2 to 5 watts for ethernet, less than 1 watt for SFP+.[0] [0]: https://community.fs.com/blog/10gbase-t-vs-sfp-which-one-is-the-best-option-for-10gbe-data-center-cabling.html https://community.fs.com/blog/10gbase-t-vs-sfp-which-one-is-... I really wish SFP+ and SFP28 would be more common in high end desktop motherboards. They’re more efficient and just better, and they can be adapted to plain old ethernet if needed (at a power penalty imposed by switching away from fiber).
- mmastrac 4y agoInteresting... my experience has been the opposite, but I will admit I am not a network engineer. I've burned my fingers on SFP modules a few times, however. Do you think that power requirements are different because SFP often uses direct-attach copper? I'm honestly curious to reconcile my experience with other, more experience persons' reality here.
- coder543 4y agoI believe both DAC and fiber draw about the same power, but DAC obviously has very limited cable lengths. I’m not entirely sure why regular ethernet draws more power, I just know this is a fairly consistent thing wherever I look. Handling the SFP module itself will more directly expose you to the heat than an integrated ethernet port, so maybe that’s the difference.
- humanistbot 4y agoI am 100% on board with the repairability, sustainability, and compatibility mission of Framework, but I absolutely hate the way they did these choices of only 4 expansion cards. A Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 [1] is 2mm thicker than the Framework, but has more than enough room for an RJ-45 ethernet port, 2 USB-C ports, 2 USB-A ports, 1 HDMI, a SD card slot, and a smartcard reader (maybe an edge case, but still). That's 8 ports, plus the headphone jack that is built in to both. If I bought a framework, I'd need to carry multiple expansion cards to have those same connectivity options, plus that RJ45 is going to stick out and probably wouldn't be good to put in a bag while attached to the laptop. I see so much hype about Framework, but does this seem wrong to anyone else? Edit: Since this got a lot of replies, I do get the benefits of an expansion slot. Put one on each side, that should be plenty. But fill the rest of the laptop with the usual set of ports in a motherboard that I can easily repair. [1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/thinkpad-t14-gen-3-(14-inch-intel)/len101t0014 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
- stingraycharles 4y agoI ended up just buying additional expansion cards and swapping them on demand. I don’t often need HDMI/DP expansion cards so I just keep them around in case I need them, and have extra USB slots for normal days.
- humanistbot 4y agoSounds like just another version of dongle hell. It is even worse for ports used less often, in my opinion. Last thing I want is to realize I want to hook my laptop up to a TV and I can't find or forgot my HDMI dongle, or want to flash an SD card and can't find my SD card dongle...
- mox1 4y agoAnd 5 years from now when USB-C 11.6rev5 (with a new 100pin physical connector) is commonplace for our 8k Displays, framework laptop owners can spend $40 to buy a new "dongle". The Lenovo owners will be buying a new laptop (or a Dongle / dock. something that physically hangs off the laptop). Repeat this process as every external connector changes physical layout, non backwards compatible change, etc. There is no perfectly forward and backward compatible laptop port layout. Lenovo does it one way (which some people like). Framework has gone a different direction (which a lot of other people seem to like).
- jonathantf2 4y agoBought it, not happy about the high shipping fee though. Wonder if it'll be coming from Taiwan like the laptop did.
- fiat_fandango 4y agoWell now I want a Framework laptop - granted, what I'd use this for is uploading media to youtube etc, and for now free options just aren't as good as Final Cut Pro or Premiere so I'll be sticking to my usb-c to 2.5G adapter for my macbook pro. Someday though!
- boldlybold 4y agoCan this plug into an existing USB-C port on the laptop? When I don't need it on the go, that would be easier for docking at my desk.
- mavu 4y agothis is going to be the next laptop I buy. Or something similar if anyone else gets with the programme and stops to produce for the landfill.
- Arubis 4y agoIs there anything Framework-specific about this other than the form factor? That is, could I just plug this into any old Thunderbolt port on another laptop and have it fire up?
- Hippieblog 4y ago[dead]
- yata69420 4y agoEvery time I see one of these frame.work posts, it looks like they're doing so much right. I can't wait to buy into their ecosystem. How long until 120hz+ displays?
- eikenberry 4y agoDoes the RTL8156 suffer from the same overheating problems many (all?) of their other ethernet chips have?
- happyopossum 4y agoApparently I’m in the minority of commenters here, but man is that U-G-L-Y. I really really would be not want to have that non-matching hunk of plastic sticking out of my laptop all the time. I also have to wonder at the longevity of that design - it’s gonna hang up every time you shove it in a backpack, I’d be concerned about the port hole cracking at some stress points.
- justahuman74 4y agoMy (primitive) sense of fashion wishes it matched the plastic color of the other expansions, rather than the clear plastic
- zinekeller 4y ago> RTL8156 I never have a good experience with Realtek networking chipsets, especially on 2.5Gbps.
- dusted 4y ago45 eurodollars for a fcking laptop nic ? yeah okay.
- greyhair 4y agoI like the stuff that Frame is doing, but I don't like the way that jack sticks out. I would be happier plugging a dongle into a USB-C port, when I needed it, than having that 'nub' hanging out all the time.
- COGlory 4y agoWhich you can totally do with the Framework.