
- #What can a thunderbolt port do upgrade#
- #What can a thunderbolt port do full#
- #What can a thunderbolt port do professional#
If you do, you’ll only enjoy USB 3.1 speeds (10Gbps). Now that USB and Thunderbolt are migrating to the same physical connector, you can plug a USB Type-C cable into a Thunderbolt 3 port. And, like USB Type-C, Thunderbolt 3 has identical plugs on either end of the cable so there’s no longer a “right” way to plug them in. That means, in practice, there’s no physical difference between a Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type C cable and port. Thunderbolt 3 uses a Type C port just like USB Type C. There’s No Longer a Difference Between USB & Thunderbolt Ports That means you can plug a Thunderbolt 3 external drive into a laptop and run both from a single power cable. Similar to USB Type-C, a Thunderbolt 3 cable provides power in two directions-up to 100W for system charging and up to 15W for bus-powered devices. It can drive a single 4K monitor at 120Hz or a single 5K display at 60Hz or two 4K displays at 60Hz. This incredible bandwidth enables you to swiftly transfer files but also to support multiple high resolution monitors from Thunderbolt 3 devices. That’s twice as fast as Thunderbolt 2 (20Gbps) and four times faster than USB 3.1 (10Gbps). Thunderbolt 3 clocks in with a data transfer rate of up to a scorching 40Gbps. So what does Thunderbolt 3 mean for you? 4K Editing Is Going to Get Easier There have been at least 40 PCs and motherboards announced that support the technology as well. Thunderbolt 3 was announced last year but at NAB a number of storage devices that take advantage of the technology were finally announced. Now there’s Thunderbolt 3, which promises still more. And the ports they are a’changing.įirst there was USB Type-C, which introduced a number of enhancements outlined here. They form the backbone of any digital workflow.
#What can a thunderbolt port do professional#
All indications are that these two standards will be cross-compatible with each other and Thunderbolt 3, which means that users won’t really have to care about what’s being plugged into what.Cables and ports probably rank among the least interesting pieces of technology that a creative professional uses, but they’re arguably among the most important. It’s also not quite clear what sorts of new features will be part of Thunderbolt 4, but the protocol is going to be tightly integrated with USB4, which will be just as fast as Thunderbolt 3 and 4. So any performance anxiety can be put to bed. The most important thing you should know about Thunderbolt 4, is that it’s not any faster in terms of bandwidth when compared to Thunderbolt 3. Not in the way that Thunderbolt 3 absolutely blew the previous generation out of the water. Thunderbolt 4 isn’t a radical leap from Thunderbolt 3. However, there’s not too much to get excited about.

It’s planned to debut in 2020 as part of the Tiger Lake chips from the semiconductor giant, so by the time you read this it could very well be in consumer products already. What About Thunderbolt 4?Īt the time of writing, Thunderbolt 4 has been announced by Intel at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show. There are many other use cases that take advantage of the massive bandwidth available through the Thunderbolt 3 standard.
#What can a thunderbolt port do upgrade#
It also means you can upgrade your desktop GPU power without needing to buy an entirely new laptop.
Now you can bring your MacBook home and hook it up to these powerful peripherals, removing the need to own two computers. Ultrabooks tend to have powerful CPUs, but lack storage and GPU power. So, for example, you can connect an external SSD or an external GPU with acceptable levels of performance. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3’s massive available bandwidth and native support for the PCIe protocol, we can now connect very bandwidth-hungry devices as peripherals.
#What can a thunderbolt port do full#
When you get to your desk, you only need to connect a single cable to your machine to transform it into a full desktop rig, while also charging your laptop. You can hook up all of your desktop peripherals to the hub. It’s actually pretty convenient when it comes to a docked desktop setup. Which means buying a Thunderbolt 3 (or USB-C) hub is the only practical way to hook up typical components to your computer. The reality is that most peripherals you’ll find aren’t native Thunderbolt 3 devices.
