WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
https://www.whatcable.uk/I have a basket with a lot of USB-c cables and without the tester I can't remember (nor guess) which one does what.
Oh god not again... before everyone starts naming their favourite brand, here's a 265 comment HN thread[1] (from last week !) on why these cheap USB-cable "testers" are not worth anything.
TL;DR You need a six-figure wallet to seriously call anything a "hardware tester" for USB cables. User ChrisMarshallNY has a one-liner summary buried in that thread:
Think about it. You need to generate a precise, calibrated, 40GHz signal, transmit it, then precisely measure the returned signal for phase, amplitude, and waveform integrity -at that speed. Oscilloscopes and logic analyzers that run at that speed, are damn expensive.
The only wrinkles for me are that Macs apparently don't interrogate cables when they don't have to, i.e., when the power adapter supplies <= 60W (not sure if that's a USB-C protocol or an Apple implementation limitation) and that the website copy is full of GPT-isms, which makes me suspect that some of the output might be assumed instead of empirically validated as well.
https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux
But (hazard guess) it comes with a headless CLI binary (no GUI libraries needed) so probably could be ported to Linux (easily with an LLM?)
As I understand it, Windows doesn't expose the necessary low-level hardware information for something like this to be possible.
I have a handful of wireless keyboards that just absolutely refuse to negotiate for charging with certain cables at all, so I'm hoping this will help me at least figure out what those keyboards are looking for in terms of cable.
I have so many cables I've accumulated over the years, I should either purge or at least categorize the functionality of each.
These tools read a chip called an "eMarker". These eMarkers are programmed to say whatever the manufacturer wants them to say - there's no requirement that the information be based in reality. Plenty of cables have eMarkers that claim "40Gbps" or whatever speeds, or support 240W PD...but absolutely cannot deliver either of those. And none of these consumer level software or hardware testers can actually test either of those claims. They can only take the cable's own claims at face value.
Resistance measurements can cursorily test claims of 240W but resistance changes with temperature which changes with current...so unless your tester puts 5 amps down the wire for 5 minutes and then tests resistance it's not a very good test. AFAIK none of the testers flow 5 amps through the cable.
Actual maximum data throughput is very hard to know. The only way to really "know" how much data can flow through a cable is with an expensive oscilloscope or cable tester. Because 80Gbps cables run at ~13GHz, at minimum you need a 26GHz scope (Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem) or more practically a 52GHz scope. And it turns out it's really expensive to measure electrical signals 52 billion times per second. The necessary devices start at $15,000 (cable signal integrity tester) [0] on the very low end and only work for max 10Gbps USB 3.2 cables, or past $270,000 for 80Gbps USB4 cables (proper 60GHz oscilloscope) [1].
On the high end, each signal integrity test device can actually cost $1-2 million [2] where the base unit starts at $670,000 plus then spending additional money for hardware-accelerated analysis, specialized active probes, and the specific PAM-3 / USB4 compliance software packages.
0: https://www.totalphase.com/products/advanced-cable-tester-v2...
1: https://www.edn.com/12-bit-oscilloscope-operates-up-to-65-gh...
2: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/uxr1104a-infiniium-ux...