Fast charging is not only about peak power, but also cooler temperatures. Can Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 5 standard handle both?
Quick charge test 5: smarter charging for longer battery life
Fast charging is a delicate beast that pushes its limits with more and more power. Qualcomm Quick Charge 5 offers over 100W of power, battery and other sensor algorithms. Overall backward compatibility for its most powerful and smartest fast charging standard yet. What’s important is that Quick Charge 5 supports USB Power Delivery and its more universal PPS variant, which means it’s a standard that should cover all of your modern devices.
We’ve seen a lot of super-fast charging tech hit the market in 2022, although most of them get pretty hot, which takes a toll on battery life. So, can Quick Charge 5 perform better? We tested the 65W charger that came with the Qualcomm smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders to see how it stacks up against competing standards.
Fast Charge 5 – Comparative Charging Speeds
To get a feel for how Quick Charge 5 compares to other standards, I first tested the Qualcomm smartphone for Snapdragon Insider against various common standards. 42 minutes maximum, 45 W max, 38.7 ° C peak
Quick charge 3: 67 minutes or less, 18W or less, 34.5 ° C peak
USB Power Delivery PPS: 51 minutes maximum, 35 W max, 34.2 ° C peak
USB power: 65 minutes maximum, 18 W max, 32.5 ° C peak
As expected, Quick Charge 5 is significantly faster than Qualcomm’s older but very popular standard Quick Charge 3. This gives the phone a lot more power than the previous standard. – about. 45 watts against 18 watts. It’s important to note, however, that the new standard isn’t much hotter than the old one, but more on that in a moment. USB PD PPS is not far behind Quick Charge 5, and both are faster than the simpler USB power supply standard, as the former is able to communicate power demands higher than the limit of 3A of the last.
It’s also worth noting that Quick Charge 5 uses USB PD PPS as the underlying communication protocol, but in Quick Charge 5 mode the phone negotiates 17V higher for 45W of power. Despite this difference in performance, USB PD PPS is not much slower than Quick Charge 5; It’s only nine minutes, sometimes even less. There is certainly additional ownership negotiation going on here above the log, and this affects more than just performance negotiation.
Load sensitive to use and temperature
The coolest thing about Quick Charge 5 is that the smartphone’s implementation for Snapdragon Insiders is handling usage and temperature. When charging with Quick Charge 5, the charger supplies up to 45 W (16.7 V, 2.67 A) of power as long as the display is off and the temperature is below approx. If used during the charging process, the charger will reduce the power to 18 W. (15.8V, 1.16A) until the temperature drops to a lower level. Interestingly, the maximum power drops to 15W and a lower voltage (8.7V, 1.77A) as soon as the battery reaches 85%, then almost completely drops to 5W. Recharge after reaching 99%.
Charging depending on temperature and usage is obviously very beneficial for battery life as the cell is kept below the light limit of 40 ° C and closer to the slightly less uncomfortable range of 35 ° C. We got worried about others very quickly. charging technologies. They push the battery temperature way beyond these limits, but competing technologies therefore charge faster. After a quick first shock, the charging power mostly drops to 30W or less. Charge 5 is not much faster than USB PD PPS in this example, although it does offer higher peak performance.
A disadvantage of this technique is that the power and speed of charging vary somewhat. I measured the phone between 42 and 53 minutes to achieve a full charge, the latter closer to Qualcomm’s official number. I find the system a bit too sensitive, as just waking the phone to check for a notification is enough to dramatically reduce the charging performance and recovery takes a while. The charging time and battery temperature, and you can clearly see the inconsistent charging time when adjusting the power up and down.
Similar behavior can be seen with Quick Charge 3.0 and USB Power Delivery, but not to the same extent. Both drop their power from 18W to 12W when the screen is on. But the norm is slower and cooler at first, so it doesn’t seem as necessary.
This behavior is not observed when charging via USB Power Delivery PSS. The power drops to a lower value of 35W (8.7V, 4.0A) and decreases as the phone charges, creating much less heat.