Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
But it’s really not about what it looks like; it’s about what it does—and this UGreen GAN X 100W adaptor has some serious power behind it.
It’s quite easy to provide overvoltage protections inside a USB-C device, I’ve done it! Add a crowbar with a zener, or one of those “protect from overvoltage” chips, problem solved. It works fine so far, though I my with 3 HDD’s max because the aforementioned Xbox PSU only has 1A on the 5v output. And the typical HDD will eat 0.3A from what I recall measuring. The Ugreen Nexode 200W USB-C charger allows you to charge six devices at the same time, and so avoid having to plug in multiple chargers for the task and free up space on your desktop. While it’s too heavy to be truly portable, it is a super-compact size for so many ports. If you have a heap of USB-C cables and none of them are built to spec, you ought to reconsider your purchasing or cable marking decisions! I have a heap of USB-C cables, all of them built to spec, and it’s not hard to remember or see which ones do what. Most of them are USB2, all of those can do up to 60W charging. Then, there’s a few USB3 ones, and one EPR+Thunderbolt one I can use for fancy stuff. I also haven’t had failures with USB-C supplies, despite the complexity – there are quite a few safeguards in USB-C designs, if you look into it!
Still, We Win
USB-C also lets you implement digital signing for device validity verification. If you can read between the lines, it smells of DRM, and that’s what it is. Some device manufacturers, especially from the HP/Dell/Lenovo dark triad, will implement DRM that makes their laptop throttle its CPU if the charger or the cable is third-party – even if it’s all the same 100 W. It sort of makes sense when Dell does that in cases where they push 6A through a verified-to-work combination of charger, cable, and laptop. But at this point, let’s be fair, the conscientious choice would’ve been to go for EPR and 140 W instead, and throttling is inexcusable either way. Anker is perhaps one of the best-known names in charging tech, and this single-port PD charger is attractive to us for several reasons. PD trigger boards are not perfect for everything. Say, you want to power a resistive load of 8 Ω through USB-C – let’s use a PD-capable soldering iron as an example. The tip needs 2.5 A at 20 V, and 1.9 A at 15 V. A 60 W charger can provide 3 A at 20 V and will happily power your load, so you can safely set your trigger board to 20 V with a solder jumper. But then, a 45 W charger can only offer 2.25 A on 20 V, however, and a 8 Ohm load will put it into overcurrent protection mode – you need to use 15 V even though the 20 V mode is available. Trigger board ICs aren’t designed with logic like this in mind – thus, projects like the PD Buddy Sink exist, pairing a PD-talking chip with a MCU that can handle more complex logic.
Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology has made chargers a fraction of the size of silicon-based models only a couple of years old, and once considered small themselves. It’s a wonderful standard but it’s in its own category, since it’s unregulated and could be like 14.4v, and it does nothing to keep you from misconnecting stuff. There are four USB ports in all—three USB-C and one full-size USB-A—two of which support a 100W output, with the other two rated at 22.5W. There’s a maximum power output of 100W, which means when you use more than one port the power rating will be reduced, but it’s still possible to get up to 65W on either of those two 100W USB-Cs. The UK three-pin model, which has a different design to those available in the US and EU—necessarily so, because the elongated design and sheer weight (268g for the UK model) of this thing would likely have trouble staying attached to the wall without that third prong to steady itself. The 8.29oz (235g) US model has a taller, more rectangular design, with folding plugs to make them more compact for travel, but the core specs are otherwise the same. In fact, trigger boards don’t tend to give you any current limit information – if there’s risk of overcurrent because the charger cannot provide 3 A at the voltage the trigger board request, you’ll just have to make sure the charger you’re using implements overcurrent protections; those are mandated by USB-C and done by most, that said, you don’t want your device powercycling every few seconds, either. Also, if you want a dual-role port that works with OTG adapters or perhaps can do high-speed lanes, a trigger IC won’t be able to help you, and you can’t just connect multiple PD ICs requesting different functions in parallel to your CC pins. We can try and surpass these limitations in later articles – for now, know that trigger boards have their well-defined place in your USB-C arsenal, and they will help you with your USB-C projects as far as higher voltages are concerned. I Want To Give Something Twenty VoltsAnd you really can’t easily see if you have the wrong one – the quagmire that USB has become means the cable may well be working perfectly for data but won’t do the voltage negotiation BS properly so doesn’t actually provide the right power at all – but the host device won’t know or care, to it its just an older spec USB cable doing its thing. And even if it does pop up that freindly message of ‘this cable is shit or the power supply too weedy’ you then have to spend ages cycling through the heap of these damn cables looking for the one that isn’t broken yet and actually was built to spec in the first place… I love, love, love USB-C PD. I have it on my phone, my earbuds (well, USB-C but not PD), my (newest) laptop and my soldering iron (it works great!). It’s only failed me with a non-compliant specialty appliance. I’m never buying another consumer device laptop or smaller, that is powered by anything other than compliant USB-C, PD if necessary (devboards and similar, get a pass, though I’m already prioritizing buying ones with a USB-C plug pretty heavily). And as 12v isn’t officially part of the spec anything can say USB-C PD and not do it, while still being 100% compliant. You can’t just read the box. Maximum power output is 65W so if you are charging a mid-sized laptop in full use, there won’t be much spare juice for the other devices. However, if the laptop is just having a battery top-up, there should be enough power to be spread about. The charging options are too numerous to list here, but with six devces charging at the same time, you could have one at 65W, two at 45W, one at 20W, and the two USB-A ports sharing 20W.
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