The Nexode 65W (CD296) is the honest travel brick: a verified 65W single-port charger with swappable US, UK and EU plugs, confirmed by published port tests. The asterisk is allocation — a second device drops the headline port to 45W and the leftovers split thin. For one laptop plus a phone on the road, that's a fair trade.
— THE VERDICT · JUDGEANY EDITORSWhat it is
The UGREEN Nexode 65W (model CD296, part number 90409, Amazon ASIN B09X1H88VP) is a three-port travel charger — two USB-C and one USB-A sharing a 65W budget. The plug kit is the reason it exists: US, UK and EU heads slide onto the body, so one brick covers most of the world's wall sockets. UGREEN builds it on GaN chips with protection against short circuits, overvoltage, overheating and overcurrent. Amazon's listing for this ASIN puts it at about 65 × 65 × 33 mm and roughly 320 g — chunkier than the fixed-plug 65W bricks that fit in a jacket pocket, but this one carries three countries' worth of prongs.
Port power and allocation
Either USB-C delivers up to 65W on its own (5V/3A up through 20V/3.25A, with 3.3–21V/3A PPS), the USB-A tops out at 22.5W with SCP and QC 3.0, and the protocol list covers PD 3.0, QC 4.0+, PPS, AFC and Apple 5V/2.4A — Samsung phones get Super Fast Charging 1.0 over PPS. The 65W headline comes with an asterisk. UGREEN's own instruction manual lays out the splits: a single USB-C port gets the full 65W, but C1 + C2 together divide 45W + 20W, C1 + USB-A divide 45W + 18W, and all three ports run 45W + 8.5W + 8.5W. Tech Jio found the same ceiling in his CD296 review: the moment a second device joins, no port sees more than 45W. One conflict to flag — a retailer listing for this exact CD296 quotes slightly different low-port splits, 45W + 15W for the dual-C combo and 45W + 7.5W + 7.5W for all three. Same 65W budget, different rounding; where it matters, the printed manual in the box wins.
Measured performance
Nothing in the published record put the CD296 on a bench load bank, so treat the ratings as documented rather than independently verified — but two reviewers measured it with real devices. Walter Shillington, testing for HubPages, confirmed the 65W single-port output and the 45W + 20W dual-C split, and watched one USB-C hold 45W while the other two shared the remaining 17W with an iPhone, an Android phone and a Whoop battery pack attached. Tech Jio timed a 13-inch MacBook Air from empty to full in slightly over an hour and a half on the 65W port, and found the brick warm but never uncomfortably hot with the laptop and an iPhone 11 charging together. The spec sheet holds up in practice; what we found no published source for is bench-level efficiency data for this model.
Thermals and efficiency
What the published record says about heat is consistent but thin. Tech Jio ran a MacBook Air and an iPhone 11 together and called the brick warm without being unsettling; Shillington's multi-device tests raised no heat complaints either. GaN's smaller die and UGREEN's thermal protection get the credit in the marketing, but no reviewer published an efficiency percentage or a surface-temperature number for this model, so any source quoting 90%-plus efficiency for the CD296 specifically is guessing. Read it as a charger that stays comfortable to hold under realistic loads, and no more precise than that.
Living with it
Amazon's listings for ASIN B09X1H88VP sit at about 4.5 stars from roughly two thousand ratings apiece on the .ca and .ae storefronts, with ongoing sales — a steady record for a charger first listed in November 2022. Tech Jio paid S$54 in Singapore back in November 2022 and called it great value for a single travel adapter; his review unit came with the three plug heads and a carrying pouch. Two practical caveats come straight from UGREEN's own notes: don't charge an Apple Watch on the USB-A port while the second USB-C is in use or the watch can disconnect, and unplug cables you aren't using, because an idle cable can restrict the other ports' maximum output. Also note the base box ships no USB-C cable — Amazon's box contents list an instruction manual — so bring your own.
Who it's for
This is the one-brick answer for the traveler who carries a laptop and a phone: one wall socket, three ports, and no separate adapter for three countries' outlets. If your kit is a 65W-class laptop plus accessories that sip power, the allocation math works. If you need two hungry devices at once — a laptop and a tablet both pulling 45W — the second one will be disappointed, and you should be shopping 100W bricks instead. Check the current price on Amazon; like every UGREEN charger this one moves around, and the value case depends on the street price.