As for “daisy-chaining” (connecting devices together in a line), you can link up to six devices and finally hook them all on a single Thunderbolt 3 port.Īll that said, there’s a wide spectrum of real-life everyday applications where Thunderbolt 3 can make a huge difference for the user. Thanks to the unprecedented data transfer rates of Thunderbolt 3, it is also possible to enjoy seamless gaming on an underpowered laptop by connecting an external graphics card on the port. Thunderbolt can send high-fidelity audio and 4K video simultaneously, so you won’t need anything else to get media playing on a screen. That could be docks where you can hook up keyboards and mice, data devices such as whole RAID arrays of external disks, or even up to two 4K displays (at 60 Hz) on the same port. The short answer would be to connect stuff on your PC or laptop. To see Plugable’s lineup of Thunderbolt 3 products, click here Thunderbolt 3 is also backward compatible with the two previous generations of Thunderbolt, although one would need to use adapters for this purpose. It supports 4-lane PCI Express, DisplayPort 1.2, and now DisplayPort 1.4 (using Intel’s latest Thunderbolt 3 controller known as Titan Ridge). This translates to transferring a 4K movie in under 30 seconds. Thunderbolt 3 supports bandwidth rates up to 40 Gbps, so it’s easily the fastest port available in the market right now. And while Thunderbolt 3 can provide power, that doesn’t mean manufacturers support it in all instances: check before you buy to ensure what you buy will meet your needs. In addition to data, Thunderbolt is also capable of delivering DC electricity to power-up devices that need up to 100 watts of power. To achieve this feat, it combines the PCI Express (PCIe) bus standard with the DisplayPort digital display interface into a single cable. Thunderbolt was created to replace the obsolete “FireWire” serial bus communications interface, and also to offer a simple yet versatile solution for the consumer. This replaced Mini DisplayPort (MDP), improving its interoperability and general compatibility. In its third iteration, which was launched in 2015, Thunderbolt adopted the USB-C connector. Thunderbolt 3 is the latest version of the hardware interface that has been co-developed by Intel and Apple since early 2011.

Usb 3 transfer rate vs thunderbolt