Are all Thunderbolt 3 ports the same?

Hello,

I'm in the market for a new laptop and one feature I want on the new laptop is a port with Thunderbolt 3. Can I assume that all Thunderbolt 3 ports on laptops are equivalent in terms of the functions they support or do some only support a subset of all possible Thunderbolt 3 functions?

My specific needs are the following: I want to be able to connect the laptop to a Thunderbolt 3 dock which itself will be connected to two 1920x1080 monitors, ethernet, and various USB peripherals (e.g. external hard drive,keyboard, mouse, webcam). I also want the dock to charge the laptop.

Thanks

 

No, they are not. Connector is usually usb-c, it may support anything from usb 2 to usb 3.x and thunderbolt 3 at the same time or just one of them...

Laptop's chipset has to support features you want, it's graphics card needs to be able to route video via usb-c/tb3 port. Not all laptops support charging with usb-c either.
Rest of the stuff can be done with usb3, no problem there.

 

Thanks

 

Assuming you mean actual TB3 ports (not just USB-C), some TB3 are routed for x2 and x4 PCIE lanes

 

I was indeed specifically referring to Thunderbolt 3 and have just realized KLF might have been referring to non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports in part of his/her reply.

I don' really understand PCIE lanes but my basic understanding is this impacts on data bandwidth and this is independent of display and power functionality. Is that correct?
If a USB-C port is marketed as having Thunderbolt 3 support can I always assume it will support at least 2 external monitors and can I always assume it will support power delivery to the laptop?

Re Non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports:
I am aware that these ports don't always support DisplayPort and don't always support power delivery.
However, I am curious to know if these non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports are capable of supporting multiple DisplayPort channels or can they only ever support one?

Thanks

 

Thunderbolt is a Standard and as such should be the same across every device, but leave it to PC manufacturers to mess things and major mess here is that some ports have 2 pcie lanes attached when they should have 4. The difference is that 2 lanes can transfer 20Gb/s of data and it takes 4 lanes to get Thunderbolt3 advertised speed of 40Gb (theoretical of course, real life is less). So without actually testing it you would have to actually do some calculations to see if it's even theoretically possible to run the stuff you want over 2 lines. Here is Dell line up https://www.dell.com/support/articl...underbolt-3-40gbps-data-transfer-rate?lang=en and quick explanation. You would have to search for other makers yourself, but I can't remember ever seeing number of pcie lines listed on any specs of any computer. If I remember correctly it's 10bits per color X 3 rgb pixels (or 4 if 32 bit color) x horizontal x vertical resolution x display frequency to give you rough estimate of data bandwith required for 1 display plus 20-30 % margin for error correction, housekeeping etc plus sound. I don't remember for sure anymore, but I think sound could be compressed but video is not. If I was you I would skip 2 lines TB3 altogether (better safe now than sorry later) and make sure it's 4 lines. Now, anybody knows how to check number of lines? I don't use TB3 now, but plan to in the future and don't want to have nasty surprise.