I have a ton of different USB cables (like many of you I guess) and a nifty device “USB Cable Tester” from treedix.
How do I determine which cable I can forget about? The best ones obviously are the C-type ones with an e-marker chip. Low/high resistance?
Decision made:
I’ll keep the cables with the lowest resistance value.
I’m not sure what your cable tester is actually doing, but it should be passing data at various frequencies and modulations corresponding to the requirements for different USB protocols (Low speed/1.x, full speed/1.x, high speed/2.x, super speed/3.0, etc.) and measure the signal integrity delivered to the other side.
The result is going to be based on more than just the cable’s impedance.
With a tester like that, you can keep everything that passes for the speeds the cable is meant to use, and toss anything that fails.
Without such a tester, I’m not sure if there is going to be a reliable way to know what is good, aside from anecdotal usage on your devices, which might not be conclusive.
If you’re referrring to this product, then I think it is just checking continuity and impedance, and is reading any ID chips to see how the cable self-reports to attached devices. But it looks like it is not trying to pass data - to do that, you’d need to plug both ends of the cable into the device, and it doesn’t seem like there are sufficient connectors for that (e.g., there are no type-B connectors on it). But none of this surprises me - a proper cable tester should cost much much more than $45.
Actually it is the very same device. It has a couple of ports which can accomodate both ends of different USB cables at the same time.
Depends what your priority is. High power, or high throughput. If both, Thunderbolt 4 cables have dropped in price so I bought a few of those and unfortunately they’re both - the 240W worth of power they can carry (God knows what for*) makes them quite thick but thus also easy to identify by sight (once you see the connectors it’s easy too because they are of course plastered with all the wondrous features it supports).
My search continues for a TB4 compliant cable that can just carry 100W. Even my MBP M4 is not drawing that amount of power when running Handbrake or something else kicking all cores into full gear. My old Intel I9 MBP, yes, that went past that line and turned into a (loud) room heater for a bit when I did something like that, but despite having way more processing power the M4 doesn’t need it. But I digress.
I have selected some cables that can carry power, mainly for charging purposes, and a few that are at least at USB 3.1 level (i.e. 20Gb/s), the rest will now go, properly labelled, to the charity shop so they will at least still do some good somewhere. I also got myself some paint markers and worked out a dot system so the connectors now tell me what they can do - saves having to use the Treedix device all the time..
BTW, I also obtained some USB-C to convertors like mini USB. That way I only have to carry USB-C cables and a small collection of convertors. Less of a mess to travel with than full cables for everything.
(*) I suspect it’s for PCs. I have come across a few Intel Windows laptops that did appear to need so much power that their docks came with special cables as the older USB-C spec couldn’t quite handle it.
One of these (future) days this
will bear fruit.
Would you please comment on the features a USB cable tester should have and how to interpret the measurements it produces?
Same question for Thunderbolt cables?
Thank you.
Would you please post a link to information about this device, including:
I tested the new cyberQU cable tester with a built-in display and was unable to get consistent or usable results from it about cable features. It’s probably the best available that’s not $1,000s. Sadly, it kept showing working high speed cables as failing, so I couldn’t tell if the cables were slightly out of spec but functional or the tester wasn’t solid enough. (They sent me two replacements.)
My suspicion is that you need device with two Thunderbolt 5 controllers that can do electrical testing and perform speed tests to really know. And that wouldn’t be cheap.
Sadly, a proper tester will cost a lot. For a modern data cable, you need to pass various AC frequencies through the cable and measure the other end in order to produce an Eye pattern, on which you or the device can make a determination.
You can do this with a frequency generator and a good oscilloscope, but that’s going to be expensive for something operating at the frequencies used by USB or HDMI or other high-bandwidth technologies. Testers used for cable certification are going to do this, whether or not they present the eye pattern as a part of the output.
And, of course, “working” doesn’t necessarily mean “complies with the standard”. Devices can often accommodate a certain amount of signal loss, and may automatically fall-back to a slower data rate in order to compensate. Unless the slowdown is enough to impact real-world performance, you might not notice.
As mentioned above