Comment by kalleboo
2 years ago
Yeah for that you need one of the POWER-Z (or I'm sure there are other brands now) USB-C cable testers on AliExpress. Will even tell you the brand of the chipset in the cable https://kalleboo.com/microblog/posts/109391700632886806.html
I actually have a POWER-Z tester (the KM003C) and it can read the eMarker (yay), but it doesn't actually test the cable pins (boo). So it'll tell me if a cable is capable of charging the laptop at 100W, but it won't tell me if data lines are all fine and if it reports thunderbolt capability.
It's pretty much useful for testing charging, but not use for e.g. eGPUs. :/
I have the KT002, and while it doesn't specifically test all the pins, the E-Marker data readout does contain if it declares Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.2 Gen1, etc compatibility[0].
And I have yet to see a cable that bothers to have a E-marker like that that then doesn't actually have the pins connected. I suspect if the e-marker lies then rather than just dropping down to a lower spec the cable will just outright fail
[0] See the bottom 2 lines of
https://kalleboo.com/microblog/images/original/https___files...
https://kalleboo.com/microblog/images/original/https___files...
https://kalleboo.com/microblog/images/original/https___files...