UGREEN Nexode 500W 6-Port GaN Desktop Fast Charger review: A beast

I’ve tested countless USB-C chargers this year, and while there are plenty of great options, some still have a compromise or two. With a tangled mess of protocols and power levels, finding a charger that powers everything optimally is still harder than it should be. Trying to match my Pixel 9 Pro XL’s finicky 37W PPS requirements, or my laptop-grade plug dropping power the moment I want to recharge my mouse, are just two of my latest gripes.

In my long search to bypass these constant pet peeves, I’ve come across another fine entry to consider for your desk — UGREEN’s mammoth new Nexode 6-port 500W. You read that right, this thing packs as much power as a washing machine, surely far more than almost anyone realistically needs for everyday charging?

While 500W of power sounds hugely impressive, can UGREEN’s princely $249 brick back up its power claims by charging absolutely everything I can throw at it? I grabbed my trusty USB charger testing equipment and a bunch of gadgets to find out.

Well, the specs on the back of this breeze block look good to start with. You’ll find USB Power Delivery support at 240W (48V/5A) on the top USB-C port and 100W (20V/5A) on the other four USB-C ports — there are no weak ports here. The entire setup will cap at 500W maximum, though, so you can’t run everything at max all at once. Still, that’s plenty to charge a few laptops at once, though I don’t own enough of them to test that.

More importantly, other key charging protocols are supported despite not being listed on the back. USB PD PPS is the big one here, with voltage scaling up to 20V, which is enough to please outlier handsets like the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL. It’ll happily charge whatever iPhone or Galaxy phone you throw at it with maximum power as well. In short: every port here is beefy, with no low-power throwaways.

UGREEN’s 500W behemoth doesn’t stop there. It supports China’s Universal Fast Charging Specification (UFCS) specification at up to 63W, along with all versions of Qualcomm’s Quick Charge, meaning that it can fast charge a much wider range of smartphones and tablets as well. I hit 45W on the OnePlus 13 — not quite SuperVOOC territory, but far quicker than the 27W or 18W caps on my other plugs. China’s proprietary standards aren’t supported here, but UFCS is quickly making them obsolete and bringing Chinese brands closer to Western mainstays.

You’ll also find Quick Charge, Samsung, Huawei, and Apple fast charging protocols supported on the USB-A port at up to 20W, ensuring that legacy gadgets top up reasonably quickly too.

With six ports in total, hot swapping is a typical Achilles heel, but again, UGREEN handles this well. After some investigation, it appears that the top 240W USB-C and USB-A ports are on their own power rings, with the four 100W USB-C ports sharing their own circuitry. As such, you can plug and unplug from the top, bottom, or one of the 100W USB-C ports without causing other connections to drop power — a small but important win. If you have multiple devices connected to the 100W USB-C ports, they will stop and start when devices are connected to other 100W ports, but this is pretty normal behavior, and the handshake times are pretty quick. No issues here either, then, and the implementation is better than some others. It’s a small engineering detail, but not having my laptop’s power disrupted just because I unplugged my phone is a huge quality-of-life win.

I don’t have enough laptops lying around to push the Nexode 6-port to hit its 500W limit. I’d probably have to borrow half the office’s laptops to hit that ceiling. Still, I have no issues fast charging a 100W laptop, a 40W tablet, and four flagship smartphones at once — a remarkable, if not altogether overkill feat. While there are too many ports to hotswap every possible combination, I didn’t see any power drops when connecting multiple USB Power Delivery devices at once — everything seems to charge as quickly as it can.

UGREEN’s Nexode 6-port 500W power brick is the real deal, then, but there are some caveats to consider. It’s enormous, for one, measuring approximately 150 x 119 x 61mm. It’s heavy too. While this isn’t a problem for a work desk, it’s certainly not a portable travel companion and might even be too bulky for a living room setup. You don’t want to put this ingot anywhere kids or pets might knock it over, although it claims to have a tip-over detection mechanism to keep power and temperatures operating safely in such an event.

Apart from the sheer size and heft, it’s an impressively feature-complete charging setup. No bright LED lights (though maybe an on light or master switch would be good), pleasantly grippy rubber feet, and the detachable wall plug are all nice touches. Perhaps its biggest drawback is that eye-watering $250 price tag. This is certainly expensive for a charger, even for desktop-bound ones. The Satechi 165W ($119.99 at Amazon), our current best pick for your desk, costs half as much, but you’re also getting less than half the power and fewer ports. Thankfully, UGREEN has been running some discounts, so if you bide your time you can pick one up for ~$220 (which is what it is at the time of me writing this).

If you’re looking for something more compact or less expensive, UGREEN’s latest models have all performed exceptionally well in our testing, too. Ranging from the inexpensive Nexode RG 30W ($18.19 at Amazon) right up to the Nexode Pro 160W ($119.99 at Amazon), there is an increasingly good range of options out there to help power all your gadgets without resorting to this absolute Goliath.

I suspect UGREEN’s latest desk buddy will be overkill for virtually everyone, including me. Even with my laptop camera, tablet, and a couple of phones on the go every day, I still haven’t found myself needing so many ports and quite so much power all at once. Still, it’s arguably the pinnacle of what USB-C power can be and solves a lot of my recurring pain points with the one-size-fits-all connector. Even for a gadget junkie like me, the Nexode 6-port 500W is more power than I’ll ever need — but it’s also the ultimate answer to my long-running USB-C headaches, and while $250 is a lot of change, it might be the last desktop charger you’ll need to buy for many, many years to come.