USB-C Power Bank Comparison Review

USB-C Power Bank Comparison Review- Intro

Many laptops these days are capable of being charged with up to 100W of power throughput through their USB-C ports, which is awesome! This means you can use USB-C power deliver with a Power Bank for arguably its most useful feature—increasing your laptops battery life while on the go. But its more than that. You can also use a 100W power adapter to power the laptop for light duty tasks, such as office work or Netflix or light gaming. This is a nice alternative so you don’t have to haul around a large power adapter with you everywhere you go, plus the 100W power adapters are cheaper than a full adapter replacement for most laptops.

Today, we’re going to be comparing three USB-C Power delivery battery banks as well as reviewing one 100W PD Adapter. The battery banks are all the maximum size you can take on an airplane, 27000 mah or 100WH. See chart to see specs and price below.

Here are links to the specific ones I purchased on Amazon:

$99 Anker 100W Power Adapter USB-C - https://amzn.to/3ekftoW

$9 Power Delivery USB-C Cable - https://amzn.to/2OlGOfV

$90 Poweradd - https://amzn.to/2W6pVdg

$129 Zendure - https://amzn.to/2W93ST8

$69 Egoway - https://amzn.to/2ZW70mH

How the Tests Were Performed

Before we get into the results, its important to know how I tested the laptops. The battery rundown tests were done as follows:

Test #1 – Playing Black Desert Online with Max brightness, no sound, wifi/Bluetooth on

Test #2 –Playing Black Desert Online with 50% brightness, no sound, wifi/Bluetooth on

Test #3 – Netflix with Max Brightness and Max Sound, Wifi/Bluetooth on

Test #4 – Charging Test with 100W Power Adapter

I also benchmarked Far Cry 5 and CS:GO to see the varying levels of performance with power adapter, just the laptop battery, and using a USB-C battery bank.

Here are some important questions we’ll also try to answer: What kind of gaming experience should one expect? How does Nvidia Battery Boost affect gameplay performance with a power bank? How long does a 27000 mAh battery bank extend a laptops gaming capability? What about when watching Netflix?

Last, but not least, we’ll also do a charge test to see how long it takes to recharge one of these bad boys with a 100W USB-C Charger.

I want to make it clear that I did test #1 with all three power banks, but because of how many hours these tests take, for test #2 and #3, I took the ratio of performance from the #1 test and applied it to the other two, giving us, I believe, a fairly accurate estimated value. I have marked and color coded these estimate values to keep it clear which value are actual. The reason I did this is because these battery tests take many hours of work, and I simply did not have the time to do all of them fully with every battery bank,  but I think the overall results will speak for themselves.

Battery life Results

Let’s take a look at how my tests went.

Test #1 had very close results, which is a good thing since all of these power banks have nearly identical battery sizes at 100WH. The Powereadd and Zendure do have the best performance ending within 30 seconds of each other, while the Egoway ended four minutes sooner.

For Test #2, I set the brightness to 50% and set the CPU power limit to 10W. Bluetooth and wifi were kept on. Sadly, as you can see, the results weren’t that much better. This really isn’t the maximum possible optimization, however. If you play lighter weight titles and utilize battery boost to limit FPS to 30, you’ll see the GPU suck up less power.

For Test #3, I played Django on Netflix at max brightness and max volume, with keyboard backlight off, wifi and bluetooth was on. The results were a little disappointing if I’m being honest, but I believe this is due to the high power requirements of this 400+ nit display. If the display brightness were reduced, I believe we would see significantly longer run times, probably upwards of 8-10 hours. Further, I believe you could eek out even more battery life if you used the Windows Netflix app and predownloaded the videos you want to watch so you can turn off wifi/Bluetooth.

Charging Test

For charging and powering the laptop directly, I used a 100W Anker USB-C Power delivery adapter. I purchased this one because it is fairly versatile. I keep a multiport USB power adapter in my backpack anyway, so why not keep one in there that can act as an extra power adapter on the fly for my laptop? The nice thing is I can also plug in my phone to charge it up as well if needed.

For charging, the Egoway reached max charge much faster than the other two. I do not know why, but it’s nice to know it charges faster. 

Power Limits Determine Performance

Let’s take at the power limits you can expect while using the laptop in the various power modes.

Laptop Plugged in – 90-100W Power limit, meaning full potential performance

Laptop Battery Only – 45W Power limit, Nvidia Battery Boost reduces this further if you have it enabled, but depending on the game, it may not make much of a difference.

Laptop Battery + Battery Bank – 45W Power Limit (Most times). In some games, I did see Battery Boost kicking in, like in CS:GO with a 30 FPS limit, but for the most games, the battery bank power limit was not limited by 30 FPS marker, even when Nvidia Battery Boost was enabled, which was very weird.

Regarding the 100W Power adapter, I think it’s a pretty cool thing to keep in my backpack or to keep one plugged in next to my bed. Not only can this charge my phone, but it’ll give me an option to take my laptop up to bed without lugging and plugging the main power adapter.

Another potential implementation would be using a Razer Core X to power the system and offload the GPU workload to an eGPU. This should have enough power throughput to power the system as long as the GPU isn’t under load—but I didn’t test it, so take that with a grain of salt.

Gaming Performance

I wanted to see the performance you could expect in various titles with different graphical demands, so I tested Far Cry 5, a heavy weight title that needs power to run smoothly, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a light weight title that can run well on older machines. Let’s take a look at the results

Now with Far Cry 5, my favored setup would be to turn off battery boost. 30 FPS just isn’t enough in my opinion for smooth gameplay, though you can also tweak the desired frame rate in the battery boost app. With battery boost disabled, I was actually able to play at 40 FPS at 1080P on low settings, and the game felt pretty good to play, but on my usual settings at 1440P Ultra the game was struggling to stay above 20 FPS.

CS:GO is where we see battery based gaming really shine. Since it’s a light weight title, you can reach 120+ FPS with the battery bank with settings reduced to low at 1440P. This made the gameplay perfectly enjoyable, even while on the go. Really impressive.  One weird thing to note is that while using the battery bank, we saw increased overall performance when compared to just using the laptop battery. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s the result I got. Perhaps the CPU was throttling without the battery bank’s additional power? Because with or without the battery bank, the GPU was sitting at the 45W power limit, but the difference in FPS was noticeable.

Practical Power Delivery Performance

Now Egoway only claims to provide 65W of power while the other two banks and wall power adapter go up to 100W of power—but in my practical experience, they all provided essentially the same amount of power, which really surprised me. I figured the 100W options would make a practical difference in accessible power, allowing the GPU to run at higher clocks or allowing the battery to stay topped off better. But that wasn’t the case. With all power banks and 100W power adapter, when running a game at max performance and max brightness, the Razer battery slowly drained while the power bank ran out of power just a bit quicker. The end result was that the Razer battery would have around 30% when power bank ran out.

Now if I power limited the CPU to 10W and reduced brightness to 30% I was able to curb the power draw enough to keep the battery at 100% while playing games. But of course, this is at reduced power limit on the GPU to 45W, significantly reducing overall performance in games, though that may not matter if your game doesn’t have very high requirements. I’m simply mentioning this because some people may want to do extended gaming sessions while just using the 100W power adapter, and that is possible to do depending on what game you’re playing, but you’ll need to really optimize the power output so that the whole computer is using less juice than is coming in, otherwise the battery will slowly trickle down to nothing in about 2.5 hours.

There are three main ways I tested the performance of the machine. 1) The Razer Blade Pro 17 was plugged into a wall. 2) I used the Razer’s built in battery. 3) I used the Razer with a battery bank powering it through USB-C. For testing gaming performance, I also tested with Nvidia’s battery boost off, so for some graphs I’ll have five columns, but I didn’t have the time to test it You’ll see as we go along.

Special Features

I do want to mention important special features, such as power bypass charging, which allows you to charge the power bank while powering the laptop at the same time. Only the Poweradd and Zendure have this feature. This would allow you to charge the power bank, while providing up to 65 Watts of power to the machine. I think this could be very useful for charging both the laptop’s battery and the battery bank at the same time while you have access to a wall outlet.

Form Factor

Depending on the bag you carry your laptop in, you might prefer the elongated shape of the Egoway or the boxy shape of the Zendure/Poweradd. I personally prefer the elongated thinner style of the Egoway, but it’s up to personal preference since the Zendure/Poweradd weight slightly less at 1.15 lbs, compared to the 1.33 lbs of Egoway.

Conclusion

The Egoway seems like the best bang for the buck, especially since it charges the fastest, but a close second would be the Poweradd, with more ports, slightly more battery performance, and bypass charging capabilities, it might be worth the slight increase in cost, but that’s only if you see yourself using the bypass charging or really want to eek out the most from a battery bank.

Thanks for checking out my comparison review! Here are the links again to items featured if you want to check them out.

$99 Anker 100W Power Adapter USB-C - https://amzn.to/3ekftoW

$9 Power Delivery USB-C Cable - https://amzn.to/2OlGOfV

$90 Poweradd - https://amzn.to/2W6pVdg

$129 Zendure - https://amzn.to/2W93ST8

$69 Egoway - https://amzn.to/2ZW70mH