Anker 737 140W Battery Bank!
Review says need special cable.
It comes with the required cable doesn’t it?
True you do need to buy a charger. Personally I’d be ok with a 100W charger to save a few $
Mine came with a cable. It says “MAX 140W” but ChargerLAB connected it to the POWER-Z device and the E-Marker chip reported 50V⎓5A, implying it is a 240W cable. Hopefully future 36V and 48V sources and devices will not fry it.
If it’s saying it can handle 50V 5A then it should. Higher voltage is much harder to fry something than rated than a higher current than rated as the pins width of the USB standard can handle 48V but the guage of the wire determines what current it handle.
I don’t see the use of USB for higher Wattage as a good trend as it’s actually increasing costs. A “dumb” 240W charger is lower cost, much simpler electronics. I do like the removal of proprietary barrel connectors but I’m perfectly happy with my current maximum device USB at 45W (my Chromebook).
Maybe E-Marker chips only come in either 50V or 20V varieties, and Anker is simply warning the consumer not to use a device that runs at more than 28V.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrJOirxxf
ChargerLAB actually posted a video of the PowerCore 24K powering different devices! This is the first portable unit they have ever featured in such a video. The nubia REDMAGIC 7S I had mentioned earlier for some reason sets this power bank to 9V⎓3A. Maybe the phone either decides not to enter QC5 mode because it is already charged beyond a certain amount or only enters QC5 mode if you use the 6A cable that comes with the phone. However, the Xiaomi Black Shark 5 Pro DOES enter QC5 mode and take over 90W from the PowerCore 24K, and just like with the nubia and the high-end AC adapters from the earlier video, the POWER-Z device shows the power bank is set to 19.5V⎓5A, but according to it, the phone is taking ~17V⎓5.4A. This is with the 5A cable that comes with the power bank. After seeing ChargerLAB’s video featuring the Xiaomi 12S Pro, I thought that Xiaomi restricted its QC5 mode to only its own AC adapters as that phone does not enter QC5 mode with even the high-end adapters. It appears this “charger DRM” is not present on the Black Shark 5 Pro or the Redmi Note 10 Pro which also enters QC5 mode and takes almost 90W from the PowerCore 24K. I still would like to hear some input from any owners of both one of these phones and the PowerCore 24K to make sure that when I plug one of these phones in I don’t fry anything after a period of time.
Something this complex is inevitably going to have devices which don’t charge properly.
They should have allowed firmware updates.
I didn’t, and won’t, buy this product, but I did buy a Powerhouse for specific devices, had my testplan, it failed it, so returned having checked there’s no firmware update coming.
Yeah I am fairly disappointed the neither of the powerhouses that I bought will ever seem to get any firmware updates. I got the 521 and the 757. I wish there was at least a way to turn down the input wattage for AC charging. Because I would love to use the 757 while traveling in my car with my 1000w inverter but the 757 maxes out the inverter and there is no way to use it other than to charge it with the 12v 120w car charger. Which takes over 10 hours. 3
Make sure you have thorough readable reviews in all the places so those behind you can find.
For everyone with an interest they either live in a country with free return and so put in the effort to buy, test, review, keep/return, or a searching for reviews as they don’t get free return
It has worked with every USB PD device I have plugged into it thus far except for that ASUS computer I mentioned earlier. I wish more users would post their experiences with different devices on this thread.
Good.
I agree.
But threads are skewed towards negative as unhappy users shouter louder. More “flat” straight factual reviews helps everyone.
So not the Amazon affiliate ridiculously positive bias, and not the ridiculously negative venting sore owner.
Just so you know, Anker’s 140W AC adapter only has 5-11V⎓5A, not 3.3-21V⎓5A like the PowerCore 24K. I thought Anker would have used the same controller in both power sources. However, the AC adapter does have EPR variable voltage (aka AVS) from 15-28V⎓5A. UGREEN’s Nexode 140W AC adapter does have 3.3-21V⎓5A. I do not yet know if it has EPR 15-28V⎓5A as ChargerLAB has yet to do a video featuring it. Also, the Anker only turns on its power-factor correction circuit when set to a mode other than the 5V mode, whereas the UGREEN’s power-factor correction circuit may be on all the time. That was the case with UGREEN’s previous 100W AC adapter but AllThingsOnePlace (a YouTube user who tests AC adapters) has not yet reviewed the 140W unit.
The reason your laptop works on 5V is because, well, it’s a Chromebook. Those are very low-power computers. I believe you can only get 7.5W out of a legacy USB-A port with a USB-A to USB-C cable unless the device supports a proprietary protocol. Some full-size laptops will refuse to accept any power at all from a source lower than 45W. If the computer is particularly powerful, charging while operating may be disabled unless the source is at least 65W, and even so, the computer may also take power from its own battery when under load. The higher you go from 65W, the better the battery can charge and the less likely the computer will need to take power from the battery. For example, someone in an earlier post says they have a Razer Blade 15 Advanced. Razer computers only work with either 45W, 65W or 100W (nothing in between) meaning if the source was 64W, the computer would only work with 45W, and if the source was 99W, the computer would only work with 65W.
You are half true.
Watts vs Volts.
If the charging electronics include a buck-boost DC-DC converter then they will work off any voltage. That has nothing to do with the power requirements. Simply a decision of the engineer.
Yes, in general Chromebook are lower power but power and voltage are entirely different.
Voltage determines if something works, then current determines how well it works.
FYI my Chromebook is an Intel Core i3. I was surprised it had a buck converter from 5V. Last evening I happened to be by a 5V 3A 15W socket , the Chromebook spent most of it’s time nearly-charged.
They can only go up to 5 amps on any of the protocols so far. So the only way to increase the watts is to increase the voltage if you want to go past 20 watts.
Chromebooks barely use more power than a tablet and that is the way they are designed. To be hyper efficient. Any windows pc running windows 10 would struggle to go below 40 watts while running and doing anything more than idle.
@BijouMan is completely right about PD protocols. And It would be literally impossible to run any windows machine on 5v, 5amps without discharging the computers internal battery.
I have been working on and planning a review video for the anker 757 lately. Since I bought it myself I am going to show the goods and the bads of it.
Keep in mind that only has 3.3-16V⎓3.25A despite having 20V⎓5A. This means that while laptops will operate at their maximum USB PD power, QC5 phones will not charge at QC5 speeds and Samsung phones and tablets will only give themselves 25W to work with. I wish Anker would list the variable voltage mode on its website and power sources. It did for a while, then it stopped. Before I bought my PowerCore 24K I wrote to Anker asking if it had variable voltage, and the support team said it had 3.3-21V⎓5A. I did not want to buy a power bank in 2022 that either did not have this or only had it at 3A.
Chromebooks covers a huge spectrum of consumption, from high-end Core i5 down to some pretty meagre Mediatek offerings, screens from 10 inch to 15 inch. Mine is a Core i3 with 13 inch screen.
The critical thing in the design is the voltage of the cells. Lower end are commonly around 8V, higher end around 19V. If you are not to be boosting the voltage that would mean the minimum input voltage is a little higher, i.e. 9V to 20V.
I was surprised mine did include a boost converter to work off 5V.
You can use the battery size in Wh and battery life to estimate what Watts you need to keep it charged. So mine is a 45.5Wh is 5.92Ah hence is a 7.7V cell. Probably why it is tolerant of 5V input. Most of my Powercore are 9V so would be a good efficient pairing. My traveling Powercore is the 20000 PD which is 9V 2.2A.
The battery life obviously depends what I am doing with it, but is typically in the 5 hours to 10 hours range, i.e. consumes 4.5W to 9W (45.5Wh / 10 hours = 4.5W). I’ve independently used a meter to measure consumption and it was around 4W. Hence at say 9V would be around 0.5A - 1W.
A more power-hungry context, larger screen, faster CPU, larger storage, more intensive apps, etc, would all form different conclusions.
You can guess what you need by doing the above calculations for yourself. e.g. you had 45Wh and got 3 hours of use = 15W to keep it charged.
I’ve looked up the top-end MBP, is 100Wh cell, and benchmarks indicate 15 hours on it’s synthetic test (only web browsing) so would be 6W.
So I struggle to see the point of paying extra for a lower capacity 140W 86Wh < 90% efficient when you’re only needing in regions of 4W -6W.
I fully accept matching use cases will exist, just should be a small fraction of overall market demand.
Personally when getting a work related laptop I ordered it with a second or extended battery for travel. Works out lighter to carry, which basically under corporate schemes made me get a Lenovo Windows laptop.
Also for Chromebooks read across as Linux. They use Linux under the hood, I unlock them and run a full desktop Linux on mine and reboot to ChromeOS if I’m wanting just a basic media consumption type experience as the power management of ChromeOS is better tuned than a generic Linux.
As an aside I did look up the MBP 2022 16" teardown, I could not one but a close model teardown of the 2021 model shows a “4-cell @99.6 Wh battery (11.45 V, 8693 mAh)” meaning it would be happiest at the 12V-15V range and as mentioned around 6W would make around 0.5A it’s expecting draw to keep charged. Nowhere near 28V / 140W
At full load the new 16” MacBook Pro can consume well over 100W despite its efficient architecture. You ideally don’t want the computer to have to start taking power from its own battery!
So would that mean at such load it empties its 100Wh battery in less than an hour?
I was looking for benchmark… this one
says 34W. So a 100Wh cell would be 3 hours?
Yes I can imagine you’d drain the cells then want to keep the MBP going at full wack while recharging the empty internal cell but one would ask why you didn’t just connect the Powercore at the start instead? You waste energy using a battery to recharge a battery, it’s far more efficient (more total hours usage) to keep the laptop’s battery charged, not draw from it all, to drain a Powercore, then when the Powercore is empty to drain the laptop’s battery.