You can now buy $ 20 USB-C cables that come complete with their own wattage meter, letting you see how fast they’re charging your devices.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been plugging it into everything to see how much it draws. The Wyze buds Pro is 99w for a 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro or a Skydio 2 drone.

The cables are largely sold by an alphabet-soup collection of brands like’wotobeus,”’ urvns’ and’chipofy”. The cable is set in a metal head, connected to a decent-quality braided cable.

Using a Kill-a-Watt and a detachable USB-C power meter as the baseline, I tested its accuracy and whether it could charge my devices properly, compared to other cables.

In most cases, it was right on the money, with a few important caveats. In many cases, the money was right, with some important caveats.

The old USB 2.0 speed of 480 Mbps is a far cry from the 5Gbps or 10Gbps you can get with USB 3.1. The charge cable took a full two minutes longer to complete the same task, bottlenecked to just 40MB / second.

The USB-C power meter I bought several years ago lets me transfer data at full speed without issues. The new USB-C power meters lets you transfer data from full speed.