alt Hacker NewsI went down the rabbit hole of cable testers, and concluded that that thicker and stiffer almost always meant ‘better’ support for higher speed and charge rates.
Anything braided is almost always junk.
I don’t have a requirement for anything over 90w though, so I can generally get away with using whatever I have lying around.
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angry_octet • today at 12:52 AM
Braided works fine? I have plenty of Ugreen and others from Amazon, what matters is what's inside.
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The high data rate cables all need to be stiffer. You can find good 100w or 240w charging cables with good flexibility, so that's a good reason to keep usb-2 data-speed but high-power charging cables.
The measure of a good high-power cable is the resistance. You can gauge it with a usb test load, typical usb power meter, and a usb-pd trigger (all can be pretty cheap, often you can find the trigger functionality combined with one of the other two). Calculate voltage drop for a given current by measuring both sides of the cable, or at least compare different cables with similar load.
But I found a "USB Cable Checker 2" by BitTradeOne which will directly measure and show the resistance in milli-ohms, very convenient! A very good cable measures 150 to 250 mOhm, the worse ones are 3 or 4 times that (at which point this device over-ranges around 1000 mOhm). You can really tell the difference with how some phones and laptops will slow their current draw after voltage droops.