I bought the Anker 737 140 Watt Power Bank and it’s freaking amazing. Here is my unboxing.
Anker 737 PowerCore 24K 140W Battery Bank Unboxing
Anker 737 140W Battery Bank!
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I bought one as well and I absolutely love it. I have been working on a review and test video for a while on it. I got the 140 watt 717 charger and the 765 cable to charge it and it blows my mind how quickly it charges. I use it to power my laptop on the daily while I am running around working.
I definitely like the numbers to tell you how much is left on the charger and more. I remember a portable charger I got with a micro USB and how much of a difference these are in terms of output, capacity, size and technology. One day I would like to own one of these and the cable and charger to go with them
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It’s definitely a niche product but so very cool. Well worth it if you are able to get it.
I think it is useful to have a portable charger which recharges itself fast.
I don’t see the benefits, and can see downsides, of having a high Watts output portable charger.
It gives its highest efficiency at 45W output.
I spent £40 on a 30W 26800 in July.
However whatever your likes and preferences, any kind of Powercore is a good idea given many of us will be expecting more power outages this year.
I bought 2 winters worth of fuel to keep warm and fed this winter with the money saved buying a 30W rather than 140W Powercore.
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Definitely good advice on the charging thank you! I usually charge it slow, but its value to me is for when i am traveling. Being able to double my laptop’s battery capacity while on the plane or at the airport is crucial. In addition to the fact that when I get stuck at an airport and everyone crowds the outlets. Being able to recharge it incredibly quickly and get away from the outlet riot is well worth it’s money. I have the 26800 as well and it has been faithful to me for over 5 years I believe. That is the one I take camping with me and most places for my phone.
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I use the Razer Blade advanced 15" which supports 100w PD. Even at a full charge it will use about 40-80 watts depending on what I am doing at the moment. I need it for work so pack longevity is not a priority on this one, it is more critical for me to have a pack that is as portable as the 737, recharge as fast as it can and be able to keep up with the demand of the laptop without throttling below 3GHz while running!! This pack delivers all of that for me.
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So a good match to your use case.
Most don’t need all that combination.
For airports with a shortage of sockets I just use a stock 3 port extension cord so I triple available ports for me+others.
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I want one. I just want to play with one!!!
The 737 24K is 64% of relative capacity, 61% relatively less dense, and represents 2.76 worse value for money than the 337 26K
So you really really need a good reason to spend money on 140W. You’re lugging over half more weight and spend more than double just because 30W isn’t enough. You really do need to be in that niche corner where you don’t need the maximum capacity, as that would be use a slower 26800, you do need performance, something which is odd for a portable charger you can keep plugged in to keep up with a laptop’s needs rather than fast recharge it, and you need fast recharge, when you could just buy two of the slower ones and recharge them concurrently for more capacity at same recharge performance.
Quite the weird user context that…
The problem with the 26800 is that 30 watts isn’t enough for most laptops and is more of a parachute than a charger. Even my ipad pro m1 uses more than 30 watts when charging and/or using lumafusion or any game. It will start to discharge. I think 60 watts is a more reasonable power expectation for more people. So the 737 PowerCore III Elite 26K is probably a better option for people who need more than 30 watts.
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There’s many 26800, I suggest if you don’t need the fastest possible powercore recharge to go with the slowest which still functions for you.
Watts is not as critical as Voltage. Voltage determines if something works or not, current then decides how well it works.
My Chromebook averages 4W consumed, it has a 45W charger so 15V but will accept 5V. But i suspect most laptops who can use 140W need at least 20V which means 60W.
If the laptop needs say 20V but can work off say 15V, it is doing a buck-boost DC-DC conversion within so would lose efficiency within. If it doesn’t have a buck-boost DC-DC conversion then it must have some minimum voltage requirement, that has to be known to know if a lower Voltage powerbank will work.
Is there a way for this 737 24K to lower it’s output to make it more efficient? Say “efficiency mode” which lowers it’s voltage until the sink stops receiving power?
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I’m not entirely sure. I would assume so, because from what I see on my ipad that it will go from 15v output to 9v output once the ipad’s battery starts to taper down. On my Razer Blade Advanced it stays 20v no matter what I am doing. So I think it’s external device dependent more.
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I suspect they did a 2s3p 6 cell configuration meaning the buck-boost is input 7.2V. Buck-boost is at it’s most efficient output double it’s input voltage, i.e. 14.4V. Standard USB PD 3 has 15V for 45W. That aligns with the review that 45W was the most efficient.
A revision of the product to allow to lower the output would extract a little more power.
Teardown of this shows a quarter of the inside is not battery. The other 26800 it’s around 1/6th is non-battery.
https://www.chongdiantou.com/archives/173239.html
Most laptops have a 19V cell so input at 28V probably loses some energy in the DC-DC step down within the laptop and would prefer 20V input (100W).
So it would be useful if the user can alter the output voltage to tune the efficiency. As it’s only 86.4Wh then efficiency matters even more than the 96Wh 26800 older products.
Laptops are designed to ingest fastest possible so even if they had 19V cells and would ingest power more efficiently at 20V, they will be holding at 28V until nearly full, which is not the best idea when ingesting from a portable charger where that speed loses stored energy. Anker should think about that and offer an update to the product where you can choose speed or efficiency.
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Yes, I think an eco charging mode for the 737 would be an awesome feature. A way to throttle the output.
When I go camping, I usually bring my 26800 with me for the slow charging and longevity. Plus it is a lot less expensive so if I drop it in a puddle I am not going to stress as much.
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Is there a firmware update capability for this? I think not?
I also camp but I take my 20000 PD because it with its charger is smaller. Even so I use it’s usbA output as I benchmarked it a long time ago and it’s 5V is more efficient than its 9V for my phone. That may be the phone’s fault I only counted recharges not a USB meter which measures passed thru Wh.
I was also going to write more about how bad value this 140W but I looked and the current prices across the range are roughly double what I paid.
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I’m no expert on usb power banks. I mainly deal with automotive programming and encoding. But if it can communicate over the the usb 2.0 pins that it does have for sure. It doesn’t need those pins to negotiate the power delivery with the receiving unit but still has them. I would assume that the microcontroller responsible for the negotiation would be able to accept coding. In the tear down video it didn’t look like there were any engineering headers on th board so I would also assume that they did the initial encoding through pins A6-A7 and B6-B7 as that would be the most cost effective way to get data into the package as it is already there. Even my 10k redux pd power bank has pins a4 through a9 and b4 through b9.
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The 6 cells are connected as one large series circuit for a nominal voltage of 21.6V, unlike the previous PowerCore Elite III 26K which used 2 series circuits of 4 cells (14.8V) connected in parallel. This is the reason for the PowerCore 24K’s cuboid design. The supply unit takes up the top front portion where the ports and display are and the cells start at the rear of the supply unit, go down and around the bottom of the power bank, and then end up back at the rear of the supply unit. You can clearly see this if you observe the indents in the cells in the video. If Anker did not want to go with the cuboid design but still wanted the higher nominal voltage, the company would have needed to make it really long.
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How do you know they’re in series? I couldn’t see from teardown how.
Link to where you saw that please.
If it is series, which is rare, then it only takes 1 of 6 cells to fail for unit to fail.
Shape is not remotely related to series as , you know, wires exist.
More common is 2s3p as it takes more cells to fail (but you lose capacity). E.g. you can alternate up/down and solder the ends together just as you can in parallel with the cells all pointed same direction. Think about it.
The cells are indeed connected in series. The circuit is in a “zigzag” shape, starting and ending at the rear of the top front portion responsible for supplying power. On the bottom of the power bank it says “4000mAh 21.6Vdc / 86.4Wh.” In the video, you can see the little indents on one side of each cell indicating where the positive side is. To use 3 series circuits of 2 cells would be very inefficient and produce lots of heat as the power would have to be converted from ~7.4V up to 20V, or even worse, 28V. This technique to increase the nominal voltage is how power bank companies have managed to produce units that supply the full USB PD rating of 100W and beyond.