USB Type-C cables capable of charging an RTX 3080 Ti gaming laptop are here
Supercharged USB Type-C cables capable of delivering 240W of power are beginning to show up, following the announcement of the new Type-C power specification last September. With one of these new cables and a compatible charger/brick, a single USB Type-C cable could deliver enough power to keep even an RTX 3080 Ti-powered gaming laptop juiced up.
Retailer Club3D has announced three new USB Type-C cables (good spot, Tom's Hardware). All three are rated to 240W peak wattage, though only the top cable supports the full 40Gbps data rate (via the Thunderbolt 3 protocol) at the same time. The lowest spec cable only delivers USB 2.0 speeds, so that's more or less just a swap-in for a proprietary power connector.
Club3D hasn't announced specific prices for these cables yet, but those should be announced sooner or later. I'd also expect a wave of new cables with support for the new power standard to follow.
Though there is something to bear in mind here before you rush out to buy one of these new cables: we've not found any 240W compatible chargers yet, and devices won't just pull 240W through their USB ports unless they're designed to.
If you still want to pick up one of these new cables, look for the Extended Power Range (EPR) specification. That's what offers a maximum power delivery of 48V at 5A and a peak wattage of 240W. The more common Standard Power Range (SPR) cables more readily available today only support 100W through a single cable, which meant only slim and light laptops with integrated graphics or low-power discrete GPUs would receive enough power while in use to not drain the battery.
With a peak wattage of 240W, these cables could, in theory, successfully keep even high-end gaming laptops charged while in use.
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