Choetech PD 100W Cable, 1.8 m Long

Even while writing the title, it felt a little unusual to describe a cable as “100 watts.” I’m more used to cables being rated by current, voltage, or wire gauge—but by power?
Anyway, read on for the review and test of this 100 W PD cable.


As a brief introduction, after I posted about a sale on chargers and cables, I took a look at the store’s other products and asked the manager if they could send me a couple of items I was interested in. They offered one of the products I’d picked out, along with this cable. I agreed, since I remembered that I could use it to test another device, at the very least—the one I showed earlier.


By the way, I received the cables and charger I bought during the sale a while ago and have already finished testing them. This package arrived just yesterday, and the manager didn’t know I’d bought anything from their store, so I ended up comparing the store’s service as a regular customer and as a reviewer.


The packaging was no different: the same envelope and the same individual resealable bag as in the order I bought, and even the delivery time was the same as for a regular order.


Actually, there is one difference: this one came with a hook-and-loop cable tie.

The manufacturer’s name is printed on both the tie and the plug housings. The connector housing is metal, but for some reason they used plastic rather than rubber to protect the cable from bending.


The store page has a long list of supported devices.


1. Type-C plugs at both ends.
2. It has a braided protective sheath. The cable is quite stiff, by the way—at least, it’s one of the stiffest cables I own.
3. There’s a slight oddity with the length. The store lists it as “6.6Ft 1.8M Length,” but I’m used to a foot being about 30 cm—or, for rough calculations, I just treat it as 1/3 of a meter. Either way, 6.6 feet is definitely not 1.8 meters. The cable’s actual length is indeed the stated 1.8 m.
4. The plug is standard length, so keep that in mind: I have at least one device that requires an extended plug.


As I said at the very beginning, it feels a little odd to call it a “100-watt cable,” since power is calculated from the current the cable is rated for and the operating voltage.
But Power Delivery works a little differently. The limit is entirely software-defined, although it is tied to a physical property. Wikipedia says:



The store page also says something about the chip, but there's no need to cut open the cable to check whether it's there.


To test it, I'll simply connect this cable to a converter board that supports PD 100W. I reviewed it earlier and complained at the time that it was "not enough meat for the tigers," since I could get a maximum of 20 V at 3 A.
1. No problems here: the tester showed support for 20 V, 5 A mode.
2. For comparison, a regular cable only allows 20 V at 3 A.
3. And of course I had to check the list of supported protocols, which pleasingly shows everything in green. Well, almost everything: Vooc Dash isn't listed, most likely because the converter itself doesn't support it. That has nothing to do with this cable, though.
4. Oddly, my second tester didn't show the 100 W mode. It's quite possible the tester itself just doesn't recognize it.


One of the most important criteria for a cable is its voltage drop, or its resistance, since the former follows from the latter. And here I ran into a bit of a problem: I couldn't connect everything in a way that would make the test valid. Once the "test setup" grew beyond reasonable limits—it included not just the load, but three USB testers and another cable—I decided to stop and think about how else I could test it all.
Of course, I could have used a milliohm meter, but that would have been just as inconvenient, and not very sporting either :)


I had to take a roundabout approach.
First, I connected the tester via USB-A and calibrated it at a load current of 2 A. Then I switched to the same converter, but via Type-C. Since the components on both channels are identical (they have independent switching), I considered the test valid.
The test showed a cable resistance of 0.19 Ω.


A cross-check using voltage drop gave roughly the same result: at 2 A, the drop was 0.39 V, which works out to 0.195 Ω. However, this measurement has some error because I measured at the converter output rather than at the connector contacts.


Now that we've sorted out the resistance, it's time to test the claimed "100 W".


Once again, I had to improvise: I needed to tell the converter that it could supply 100 W (otherwise the power would be limited to 60 W) while also connecting the load after the cable.
Everything went smoothly: the converter board's protection cut off the load at 5.1 A.


Since the load was getting less than 20 V, the final output power was about 97 W—actually a little more, since there was also a voltage drop across the USB tester.
Don't be alarmed by the sharp voltage drop: the graph's vertical axis doesn't start at zero, but at 14.5 V.


Next, I wanted to see how stable it all was, although this was really a test of both the cable and the converter.
I set the load current to 5 A and left it to "warm up." While I was at it, I measured the voltage drop across the cable in this mode. It came out to about 1 V, which confirms the previous measurements: 1/5 = 0.2 Ω.

In practice, the converter was supplying about 103 W, while the load was getting 98 W.


I ran the cable like this for about 20 minutes.


1. The test setup as a whole.
2. The cable itself warmed up to 43 degrees and felt noticeably warm to the touch, but it was dissipating about 5 W. Yes, this is what "warming up the cable" looks like in the literal sense. Now I can sell it for more :)))
3. I also checked how hot the converter got; it was acceptable.


Update.
I was asked about data transfer. The thing is, it was difficult for me to check this with 100% certainty, since all my testers only support USB 2.0, and there were no problems there. So I took a different approach and started checking the contacts for continuity. But it turned out to be much simpler: the cable physically lacks the contacts for USB 3.0. You can see that just by looking inside the cable.
Above is the full USB Type-C cable configuration; below is the reduced version—the one we have here.


So the claim "Up to 5Gbps" isn't quite accurate, since the actual maximum here is 480Mbps.


On the other hand, though, this same image says “Hi-speed transfer,” which points specifically to USB 2.0, since USB 3.0 is already SuperSpeed.



Final conclusions.
On the one hand, the voltage drop across the cable is quite large: at 2 A, it’s about 0.4 V. So when powered by a 5 V power supply, it’s well outside the ±5% tolerance—the voltage drops to 4.6 V instead of 4.75 V.
On the other hand, the cable is 1.8 m long, which is no small distance, and its resistance works out to about 0.11 Ω per meter, which is considered a good result.

But if we look a little deeper, we can remember that the cable’s main selling point is support for 100 W Power Delivery. This mode only works at 20 V, where even a 1 V drop at 5 A isn’t particularly noticeable in the overall picture, amounting to 5% of the total power.

What I’d personally like to see, and what I think would make this cable better:
1. Softer insulation—it really is noticeably stiff.
2. A length of 1 m (or maybe even 0.8 m) instead of 1.8 m, but only if it keeps the same wire gauge and number of conductors as it has now. Then it could work properly at low voltages, and even better at high voltages.

Overall, though, the cable does its job; the rest is mostly me nitpicking.