[greggsy]

I went down the rabbit hole of cable testers, and concluded that that thicker and stiffer almost always meant ‘better’ support for higher speed and charge rates.

Anything braided is almost always junk.

I don’t have a requirement for anything over 90w though, so I can generally get away with using whatever I have lying around.

[ploxiln]

The high data rate cables all need to be stiffer. You can find good 100w or 240w charging cables with good flexibility, so that's a good reason to keep usb-2 data-speed but high-power charging cables.

The measure of a good high-power cable is the resistance. You can gauge it with a usb test load, typical usb power meter, and a usb-pd trigger (all can be pretty cheap, often you can find the trigger functionality combined with one of the other two). Calculate voltage drop for a given current by measuring both sides of the cable, or at least compare different cables with similar load.

But I found a "USB Cable Checker 2" by BitTradeOne which will directly measure and show the resistance in milli-ohms, very convenient! A very good cable measures 150 to 250 mOhm, the worse ones are 3 or 4 times that (at which point this device over-ranges around 1000 mOhm). You can really tell the difference with how some phones and laptops will slow their current draw after voltage droops.

[angry_octet]

Braided works fine? I have plenty of Ugreen and others from Amazon, what matters is what's inside.

[greggsy]

I should qualify that the vast majority of braided stuff I have accumulated over the years is junk.

thats over ten years products freebies, packs of 3 bought on the cheap, a few ‘fancier’ ones here and there, and at least a couple of emergency airport and gas station purchases.

[somat]

True, braided has absolutely nothing to do with the specs of the cable, but braided "feels" higher quality, so I suspect quite a few manufacturers think they can skimp on the cable quality because of that.

[jambalaya8]

It doesn't just feel like high quality... a lot of bending results in fewer cable replacements necessary, usually.