As many know the C rate of Lipo packs are not very reliable and pretty much made up as a way to sell packs.
In theory the higher the true C rate the stronger the pack will be. One thing to consider is the mAh of the cell and it’s size also impacts the ability of the cell to hold voltage under load. Then you have the materials used to make the cells. Typically low priced packs like the ones sold on Amazon are built using NMC or LMO for cathode material. This makes for weaker cells under load. SMC uses 100% LCO for the cathode which is the best material to hold voltage under load.
We decided to use a different method to show the packs rating which is more accurate as we use the voltage under load to determine the cells rating. We call this Performance Factor and we get this number by loading up a fully charged pack at 100 amps and taking the voltage of the pack at 5 seconds. This is similar to the amp rates you can see under acceleration in a normal 1/10th size vehicle. We take the voltage of the pack and divide it by the number of cells and this gives us the voltage per cell. A 2S pack that is at 7.84 voltage at 5 seconds under 100 amp discharge would have a 392 rating which 3.92V per cell. If we offer this model as 3S, 4S and 6S you can multiply the 392 by number of cells. A 6S pack would 2352 or 23.52V. The reason why we picked 100 amps instead of a lower amp rate or higher amp rate is we feel the higher the amp rate the more difference you can see in the cells voltage drop under load. We decided on 100 amps as this would cover the range of packs we offer and show which packs hold better voltage under load.
You can use our Performance Factor rating to determine which of our packs offers the most power under load. You will notice that the higher the C rate the higher the Performance Factor number will be. Even though SMC has to play the fake C rate game to be able to sell packs in todays market we make sure that our C rates are useful where if you buy our 150C packs they will have more power than our 100C packs. This is not always the case with other brands. If you click on the Video link in the first sentence in this section you will see how some companies have no respect for C rates and just label the same packs with different C rates.
