It never should have taken this long, but after a year of waiting
I have finally used USB4 ports on a laptop that doesn’t carry an Apple
or Intel logo and let me tell you, it’s simply glorious.
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Yes, you’re probably scratching your head wondering why I’m
so legitimately giddy to use USB4, but it’s the final piece of the puzzle
that should give all laptops equal footing and access to super fast external drives,
docks and monitors, and external GPU cabinets.
USB4, if you don’t know, was introduced in 2019
and essentially adopts Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 functionality that Intel released to the world.
Up until now, most non-Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports have been limited to a maximum of 10Gbps.
Although USB 3.2 can hit 20Gbps,
few to none laptops have ever adopted that version.
USB4 increases the maximum throughput of the port to 40Gbps for all device traffic,
and more importantly, brings the ability to tunnel PCIe through it.
In practical terms, that means the ability to use an external GPU on a tiny laptop to
increase graphics performance or the ability to use a much, much faster external SSD.
And yes, AMD and laptop vendors have been saying
for months on end that USB4 would “soon” arrive but it’s been so overdue many had given up hope.
Against all odds, I now have one in my hands!
This is the Asus’ new ZenBook S 13 OLED which features AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800U in it
that we’ve previously covered on the channel and teased USB4 testing.
Besides offering better performance than the previous Ryzen 5000 series,
the new chip officially integrates USB4 support.
Out of the box, the ZenBook I tested USB4 with wasn’t
quite ready but using an AMD-supplied beta BIOS, I was able to conduct testing of the port.
For my testing I did two things, I installed the beta BIOS on
the Asus ZenBook S 13 OLED and gathered up as many USB-C based devices as I could.
For USB 3.2 and lower, I unsurprisingly had
no issues since USB4 is compatible with USB 3.2 and USB 2.0.
I was more interested in higher-performance so the
first fast device was a Sandisk G-Drive Pro Thunderbolt 3 drive.
In the past it has only worked for me on Thunderbolt 3 laptops.
Plugging the G-Drive into the ZenBook gave an audible signal but nothing else.
In fact, no other Thunderbolt device worked either. Such a let down.
After my feedback,
AMD supplied another updated beta BIOS which I was told would work.
After installing that BIOS, and booting into Windows 11 the Sandisk G-Drive Pro Thunderbolt
3 worked and I saw performance levels I’ve long only seen on Intel-based Thunderbolt laptops!
Sequential read performance of the G-Drive was about 2.8GBps.
That's about what I’ve seen from the drive on Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 based laptops.
So how much faster is it?
That’s about triple the performance I’ve seen from
multiple M.2 USB 3.2 enclosures using USB 3.2 10Gbps over USB-C.
The G-Drive appears to function and work exactly as how you’d expect it to.
Windows 11 shows it as a PCIe-based drive
which means you should dismount it from Windows before unplugging it suddenly.
But the SanDisk drive wasn’t the only Thunderbolt drive I tested.
I also used an Amazon-purchased “USB4.0” M.2 enclosure made by Acacis.
The enclosure claims USB4 but it really isn’t.
Like other early USB4 devices I’ve tried, it’s built using an older Thunderbolt 3
Intel controller with a bridge-chip to a USB 3.2 10Gbps chip.
Yes, plugging it into a USB4 port with Thunderbolt 3 means it will
in fact run at the higher speeds but it’s not a USB4 device in the letter of the law.
Nonetheless, it does function fine in Thunderbolt 3 mode
and you can see proof of that with a Samsung 970 Pro SSD inside of the enclosure.
The only piece of hardware that didn’t work was a Sonnettech Solo1G 10GbE Thunderbolt 3 adapter.
If you’re thinking it’s some Ethernet device issue,
it doesn’t appear to be. I know that because I also use an
OWC Thunderbolt dock in Thunderbolt mode with its Gigabit Ethernet support working just fine.
Besides the ability to actually have high-performance drive work
on a non-Intel and non-Apple laptop, the most exciting capability USB4 will
enable on AMD laptops is the ability to use an external GPU enclosure.
To test that I grabbed an Asus XG Station Pro Thunderbolt 3 cabinet,
installed an older GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and plugged it in.
The eGPU cabinet showed up in Windows and installed drivers from Windows Update.
Obviously one reason to use an eGPU on a slim laptop is for the gaming performance
increase so I ran a quick test to look at what’s possible.
So I used the synthetic 3DMark Time Spy test which is nearly a pure graphics-focused test.
As impressive as RDNA2 is, it’s still not on equal footing with a
discrete GPU and we can see the 5-year-old GeForce GTX 1070 Ti about 174 percent faster than it.
Not everyone uses an external GPU for gaming,
so I also ran Puget System’s Pugetbench Premiere Pro benchmark on the laptop
and we can see that performance is about 46 percent better with the external GeForce.
Remember though,
this isn’t about how much better even an older GPU is over the best IGP available today—
it’s about the fact that you can finally, finally get an eGPU on an
AMD laptop without using proprietary systems that are locked to a single laptop design.
That’s been a luxury only Intel laptops with Thunderbolt have been able to enjoy
now opened up to AMD laptops with USB4.
All of the testing and results so far have been the result of pairing the
ZenBook’s USB4 port with older Thunderbolt 3 hardware.
The future is really about USB4 ports with native USB4 hardware which isn’t easy today.
In months of looking, I’ve found only one “real” USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 device: OWC’s miniStack STX.
It’s a compact and stackable storage hub made to fit under a Mac Mini and can take
an M.2 drive as well as a full-size SATA hard drive.
It has enough power to charge the laptop as well as power all of the devices plugged into it.
When I say real, I mean it uses Intel’s latest Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 JHL8440
“Goshen Ridge” controller which is so rare today,
I took apart the miniStack just to confirm it with my own eyeballs.
It’s worth reiterating that a laptop with a USB4
port can be Thunderbolt compatible and work with older Thunderbolt 3 hardware
as well as new USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 hardware even though it isn't Thunderbolt certified.
Thunderbolt certified has long been Intel's stringent,
and slow, program of certifying monitors,
docks, drives and computers to properly implement Thunderbolt.
The upshot is, USB4 hardware with Thunderbolt compatibility can
work just fine with older Thunderbolt 3 hardware but doesn't have to be certified.
At least, that's what I know right now. Who knows what the future will bring.
So what does this mean for your USB4 laptop?
I think the upshot is, Thunderbolt will work on it.
That's because Microsoft has decided,
all Windows 11 laptops with a USB 4 port must support advance PCIe tunneling.
Even though that's actually optional.
But because Microsoft is going to tell everyone to do it to get a Windows 11 sticker
they're all basically (probably) add Thunderbolt 3 to every USB4 laptop.
So that means on any Windows 11 laptop with a USB 4 port it's only going to be USB4 with
all the advanced functions and it cannot be a USB 3.2 type-c CALLED a USB4 port.
Viewed from Intel and Apple land,
the ability to run USB4 on a laptop can only be seen as one big gaping
yawn.
After all,
Apple fans can chirp that they've had USB4 since the first MacBook M1 was introduced in Nov. 2020.
And Intel pre-dates Apple's release by two months
with its original Thunderbolt 4-based Tiger Lake laptop CPUs.
All that salt should be taken as seriously as NBA fans crying on Twitter,
because the significance of AMD laptops with USB4 isn't about who is first—
it's about USB4 arriving on yet another platform.
With Apple, Intel and now AMD shipping USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 capable laptop chips,
the fantasy of one cable and port to rule them all is really alive.
There will still be many challenges along the way as we'll need to see how laptop
makers roll out USB4 and market it, but to be able to finally sit here
and plug a USB4 device into an AMD laptop gives me hope it may all finally come true.