Do you have any Thunderbolt 3 cables?

[Muse]

Two of my laptops have a couple of Thunderbolt 3 connectors. I use them but just for the USB 3.1, not the USB 3.2 which is the much speedier and capable (power transfer, etc.?) Thunderbolt 3 capabilities. Is it a good idea to get at least one Thunderbolt 3 cable (i.e. with USB 3.1 connectors that looks like elongated symmetrical ovals)?

I have no immediate use but figure there must be something, either now or in the future that will use such a thing. An ebay seller is selling a 0.7M one that looks quite legit for about $13.

 

[Muse]

What uses do you have for an actual fully compliant Thunderbolt 3 cable (i.e. with USB C connectors on both ends)?

 

[quikah]

Don't think you need to buy a cable until you have a use for it. The peripheral might come with the cable needed.

The best thing for a laptop is a thunderbolt dock which would allow you to do multimonitor at 4K and have several ports to plug other peripherals into. External GPU and external NVMe drives are another use.

Unless you actually would use this stuff though, would be a waste of money. These things are not cheap.

 

[pete6032]

I don't have any cables but I really like the ports. It's great that I can plug in a monitor, dock, etc. and it's all the same output port on my laptop.

 

[IronWing]

I have one for my work laptop and use it to attach the dock. I have the ports on my desktop and the video pass through to feed it as I had a specific monitor in mind when I bought the computer. The monitor went out of production shortly after I bought the desktop so I never got one. I use the port to attach the iPad to the PC but it isn't using thunderbolt protocol is this case.

 

[deadlyapp]

Thunderbolt is useful when it is useful. I only use it for docking. Much more flexible than the old docks that were literal docks.

 

[Muse]

Thunderbolt is useful when it is useful. I only use it for docking. Much more flexible than the old docks that were literal docks.

Yeah, I have two old Lenovo T60's on docks but my newer Lenovo laptops are not on docks. I use one on my lap (right now!) and the other on my kitchen table. I've looked at a few of the accessories I could get for them, Thunderbolt 3 connected.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Never dealt with Thunderbolt, or many apple products over all really. I know you can get Thunderbolt stuff for PC now too though but still never really had a use case.

There's some interesting things it can do though like monitor daisy chaining and even GPU and storage etc. But from what I've read it's still kind of finnicky, it won't always work in all scenarios, there's lot of "it depends". So I would not setup my environment based on the assumption that I can make everything work as with my luck I'd run into one of those "it depends" situations such as the particular device or config I'm trying to do not working with that specific setup.

I think they do need to come up with a fully universal thing that is not owned by any particular company though, and they should also standardize docking stations. Make it a common connector that is always on the same spot on every laptop, so that any laptop works with any docking station. Kinda like SATA drives and drive docks, the sata ports on the drive are always physically in the same area of any drive so you can put any drive in any dock.

 

[Muse]

This Lenovo P1 laptop complains if it's being charged too slowly. The supplied 125watt AC adapter is kind of big and heavy... doesn't bother me at home but at the moment I'd favor this laptop for travel over anything else I have. However, the adaptor being big and heavy, I bought a SlimQ 65 watt GAN charger through Indiegogo that was billed as the world's smallest and subsequently their 100watt GAN charger, thinking they'd be better for travel. The last came (at my option) with a connector that would work with a USB C cable so it would plug into Lenovo's proprietary (AFAIK) charging input jack. Whether or not an actual Thunderbolt cable would improve the charging I don't know. The laptop still complains of slow charging using the lighter 65watt SlimQ charger. It complains, but it works... slowly. I queried SlimQ if their supplied cables (which are flexible, thick and just plain seem weird) are Thunderbolt 3 compliant and they replied no, will supply USB 3.0 data throughput of 4.8GB/s. I suppose any USB C cable would charge with the same efficiency, but I'd have to do experiments to confirm that.

 

[deadlyapp]

Never dealt with Thunderbolt, or many apple products over all really. I know you can get Thunderbolt stuff for PC now too though but still never really had a use case.

There's some interesting things it can do though like monitor daisy chaining and even GPU and storage etc. But from what I've read it's still kind of finnicky, it won't always work in all scenarios, there's lot of "it depends". So I would not setup my environment based on the assumption that I can make everything work as with my luck I'd run into one of those "it depends" situations such as the particular device or config I'm trying to do not working with that specific setup.

I think they do need to come up with a fully universal thing that is not owned by any particular company though, and they should also standardize docking stations. Make it a common connector that is always on the same spot on every laptop, so that any laptop works with any docking station. Kinda like SATA drives and drive docks, the sata ports on the drive are always physically in the same area of any drive so you can put any drive in any dock.

Thunderbolt is not an apple specific feature. It's also just called USB-C.

I've never had an issue with any USB-C devices thus far, using multiple Dell docks and a handful of hub and display adaptors.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Wait USB-C and thunderbolt is the same? I thought TB was an apple thing and that it was same connector as mini displayport? I bought a mini DP to normal DP adapter a while back thinking it was electrically the same, but turned out it was meant for Thunderbolt at least from what I was told.

 

[deadlyapp]

Wait USB-C and thunderbolt is the same? I thought TB was an apple thing and that it was same connector as mini displayport? I bought a mini DP to normal DP adapter a while back thinking it was electrically the same, but turned out it was meant for Thunderbolt at least from what I was told.

From Wiki

Thunderbolt is the brand name of a hardware interface developed by Intel (in collaboration with Apple) that allows the connection of external peripherals to a computer. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 use the same connector as Mini DisplayPort (MDP), whereas Thunderbolt 3 re-uses the USB-C connector from USB.

All of my PC laptops have USB C now (about 2-3 years old) and I can use the same dock for any of them.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Wow that's kind of confusing then, so it can be either USB-C or Mini DP depending on version. Hopefully they have some kind of electrical protection in case you plug the wrong type of device in one of those ports?

 

[deadlyapp]

Wow that's kind of confusing then, so it can be either USB-C or Mini DP depending on version. Hopefully they have some kind of electrical protection in case you plug the wrong type of device in one of those ports?

I don't see how you could unless you hacked up some type of adaptor that doesn't exist. There are standards for all of these things and I would expect that you could not get a mini-DP to USB cord that would in turn fry something.

 

[IronWing]

Thunderbolt 3 uses the same connector as USB-C but the specs are different with Thunderbolt demanding higher speeds.

 

[Muse]

If you shop the T3 cables you find that many (most) have just one USB-C end but some have two. T3 speeds presumably reach as high as 48GB/sec. I believe that T2 speeds reach 10GB/sec. T4 is on the horizon I believe but the speed doesn't increase, there are some other enhancements.

 

[Muadib]

Thunderbolt 3 uses the same connector as USB-C but the specs are different with Thunderbolt demanding higher speeds.

I'm posting this from my favorite PC mag, and hope that it will clear up some of the confusion.

What Is USB-C? An Explainer

With so many devices (even the iPhone!) now featuring USB-C, it's clear that the interface is here to stay. Here's why that's a good thing—even if not every USB-C port is created equal.

www.pcmag.com

 

[Red Squirrel]

It seems like they tried to make this as confusing as possible. They really should have stuck with a dedicated port for TB instead of half assedly trying to make it sort of but not quite USB-C. This is probably all the "it depends" stuff I've heard about before about TB. Can you plug a TB device in that port? Can you plug a USB device in that port? It depends. That's not very universal.

I guess that's a very first world problem though, because I don't have anything new enough to have any of those ports.