What are the specifications of the USB-C charging cable?

[Starlight]

Is the USB-C cable included with the Power Adapter rated for 3 A at 20 V (60 W) or 5 A at 20 V (100 W)? The USB-C standard also has numerous other options in cables like data rates and whatnot, that I can’t think of from the top of my head.

I wasn’t able to find these specifications anywhere, and I’m really curious.

[amoun]

I doubt it 5A, but you never know. It would be good to know it is overrated for the 60W and won’t burn out etc.

This question has been asked before

The Power Adapter

Question about the USB-C cable itself that comes with the adapter. Does it support 100W (20V @ 5A), or just the 60W that the brick adapter can output? Also, would framework consider creating a 100W power adapter (or maybe more once the new USB-C PD spec becomes more common, which might be useful for a higher-powered device/framework laptop)? I’m having trouble finding one that I would feel confident in using (not some low quality adapter or one with vague specs given).

[Shiroudan]

Data rate for the included charging cable is USB 2.0 I’m pretty sure.

[Fraoch]

Confirmed: Mainboard/Mainboard_Interfaces_Schematic.pdf at main · FrameworkComputer/Mainboard · GitHub

Note the “PD Controller Cypress CCG5” on both sides of the laptop interfaces with the CPU by I2C and USB 2.0 and to the port by USB 2.0.

Plus USB-PD negotiation doesn’t involve much data, so there’s no need for speeds faster than USB 2.0.

Edit: but of course we’re talking about the cable, not the laptop. However I confirmed the cable only passes data at USB 2.0 speeds: an M.2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD in an enclosure that normally reads at 988.9 MB/s (7.9 Gbps) only reads at about 42.4 MB/s (339.2 Mbps - USB 2.0 speeds).

[Starlight]

@Fraoch

As for how much current the cable can handle, it has heavy gauge, thick wires - it probably would withstand 100W (20V @ 5A) but that depends how much heat would be generated over its length with that much power running through it. Well-engineered cables are usually overspecced, and this appears to be a well-engineered cable, but you can’t be sure.

100 W USB-C cables are electronically marked using a chip, I believe chargers will not supply more than 60 W (which is the minimum every USB-C cable should be able to provide) unless they detect that the cable is rated for it. So it should be a binary yes or no for that part. Unfortunately this spec is often only listed on the cable packaging and not the cable itself, so there’s no way to know for sure just by looking at the cable as far as I am aware.

[Fraoch]

Right, I forgot about the “e-marker” chip, sorry.

[amoun]

@Starlight

100 W USB-C cables are electronically marked using a chip,

Yes that’s what I was thinking and there’s no mention of it being a smart cable, so designed for 60w is still my guess.

[nrp]

It’s a 5A cable with USB 2.0 support. It does have an e-marker to allow 100W.

[amoun]

Impressive: You mean it really has an internal chip? Which end of the cable so I can treat it more carefully.

[Starlight]

This is probably our best bet at finding out:

USB-C Charging Cable Post-Mortem

Good evening everyone Long story short, I tripped on my charging cable while my laptop was charging. Shame on me, should’ve been more careful. Having tried to bend the plug back into place with no luck, I declared the charging cable a lost cause. I decided to explore the cable that FW ships with their laptops. Having immediately cut the charging plug off, here’s the decapitated and mangled plug: [img] And the rest of the cable, for reference: [img] Now, I stripped the charging cable into…

However, I don’t see any such chip in any of the pictures, and they only took apart the angled end, so that suggests it’s in the straight end of the cable.

[amoun]

So I’ll be especially careful with the straight connection which is more often in the adapter than the laptop.