Thunderbolt or no Thunderbolt - that is the question

[BradGray]

Hey Passengers!

Almost there with what I think my next workstation will be. It's been an interesting research journey, and even was briefly excited about the Mini Mac's and there M1 chips, but will be building a windows workstation.

The question is: Do I really need thunderbolt ports or not. Currently I have no use for it, but for the future.....

Thoughts?

Having the option to do it for the future would be good, but I think USB-C on a good interface, will likely suit my needs. But thought I'd post here to see what y'all think.

Thanks,
Brad

[RPaul]

Almost there with what I think my next workstation will be. It's been an interesting research journey, and even was briefly excited about the Mini Mac's and there M1 chips, but will be building a windows workstation.

The question is: Do I really need thunderbolt ports or not. Currently I have no use for it, but for the future.....

Thoughts?

Having the option to do it for the future would be good, but I think USB-C on a good interface, will likely suit my needs. But thought I'd post here to see what y'all think.

My thought at this point is, if you're thinking about going for an audio interface that requires (or prefers) Thunderbolt, then yeah, but you don't necessarily need to add it now if the support for your motherboard is optional.

I do have Thunderbolt on my 2014-vintage PC, which is an ASUS X-99 Deluxe motherboard with the optional Thunderbolt II card. I'm using it to run a MOTU 828x audio interface. However, I learned, after I'd already built the system and bought the interface, that the MOTU 828x doesn't really run any better on Thunderbolt than USB2. For better or worse, I didn't do sufficient homework on that front (despite having done a huge amount of homework in my system building in general) and had just assumed the interface should perform better with Thunderbolt.

The nominal advantage of Thunderbolt versus USB is that it gets a more direct line into the CPU than USB peripherals do, which could conceivably mean better latency for audio streaming. But, if the interface doesn't actually need it, and doesn't do any better that way than if running through USB2, so much for that idea... But, of course, some interfaces require it.

I'm ignoring other potential uses for Thunderbolt for the simple reason that I really don't know much of anything on that front. My whole reason for going Thunderbolt was for audio interface purposes (my previous system had a PCI-based audio interface).

Rick

[BradGray]

Thanks Rpaul!

I may, in the future, move to something that needs Thunderbolt - something like the UAD interfaces. In digging into all the differences, it's really around speed. USB 3's start at 5Gb, and go up to 20Gbps, whereas Thunderbolt 3 supports 40Gbs. From what I've read the main benefit is latency when you're getting into a higher track count, and need more throughput to your interface. Thunderbolt also allows for chaining of other Thunderbolt devices.

All that said I've just been working out the specs, best deal, et all and I'm landing on a custom build that has multiple USB 3.2 ports, and a header on the motherboard in case I were to move towards a Thunderbolt interface.

Latency is not so much a difference between USB 3.x and Thunderbolt, unless you were to exceed the available bandwidth which would introduce latency. But I think to even exceed 10Gbps, the track count and processing would need to be quite large....I'm assuming.

Right now I'm using the Focusrite 18i20, and quite like it. My CPU is the bottleneck now, and not the USB port.

Thanks,
Brad