In shopping for laptop packs, I’ve been avoiding 10.8v and 14.4v packs and focusing on to 11.1v or 14.8v packs on the theory that the latter will tend to be newer.
In people’s experience, is this a reasonable assumption? I’ve been eyeing 10.8v packs lately because there are more of them at lower price points, and the wH/$ numbers are often favorable (assuming that they can actually still deliver).
I think the 10.8V ones are LifePO4… not Li-ion.
No. They are all the same li-ion cells. The difference is just they way the cell maker writes their data sheets.
Yup, LiFePO4 is spec’d at 3.2V or multiples of that.
Definitely not LiFePO4s. I’d thought that there was some generational difference between the 3.6v and 3.7v cells, but it looks like it might just be marketing-driven spec creep.
Still, is it be reasonable to assume that the 3.7v-based packs are newer, at least within a given brand?
No.
Thanks, HJK and Comfychair.
Are there any useful generalizations we can make about packs built with cells with 3.6v nominal capacity vs 3.7. Do particular cell manufacturers use one vs the other?
Not really, there are 4.2v & 4.3v cells both listed as '3.7v nominal' (packs using those two will both be listed as '11.1v').
Yeah, I went digging through the laptop pulls thread. There weren’t that many packs that had a nominal voltage indicating a 3.6v cell listed in the post, or in the picture of the pack. Of those few that did, the only obvious pattern is that they are all Japanese. Of course, there are plenty of packs with Japanese cells that have a 3.7v nominal cell voltage…
Another pattern, Asus seems to label packs with 2,800 LG and Samsung cells as if they have a 3.75V nominal voltage.
Oops, mistake in my last post, the 4.3v Samsungs are indeed classified as 3.75v... but the packs they're used in are still labeled 11.1v.