The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

Thunderbolt 3 really is amazing. Im using a OWC Thunderbolt Dock to connect my MacBook to: an eGPU thats driving a 5K monitor, a 1TB TB3 SSD, and 24/96 USB audio to my stereo. All over one cable.

BTW if your using TB3 as your main connection to your laptop I highly recommend a magnetic TB3 adapter. This has been working great in my setup for over a year and makes docking/undocking a snap.

https://www.amazon.com/Magnetic-Thunderbolt3-Connector-Trans...

After trying out 4 of them for the past year, the only TB3 Dock I recommend is the CalDigit TB3. Works great for 4K@60 and has every port I need for my media production needs.

A lot of the usbc hubs only support 4k30, or have weird power delivery limitations/incompatibilities. I didn’t want to gamble $300+ on a hub that might not work.

My solution was to use an LG thunderbolt monitor (which has a usb3 output), and hang a cheap self powered usb3 hub off that for all the lower bandwidth peripherals.

This has worked well between Mac and pc so far, just one cable that does 4k60, 100W power delivery and handles all the other peripherals in the background.

One gotcha: Apparently some monitors deep sleep options mean the monitor powers down the hub and laptop won’t wake up from keyboard/mouse events!

Hopefully via usb4 thunderbolt can be commoditized and we can get cheaper universal hubs rather than a $300+ dock, but at the moment you need to spend a huge amount to do anything with multiple thunderbolt connections.

If you don't already have the 4k monitors, just get one with a thunderbolt input/output. A slightly more expensive dell monitor with good thunderbolt/usb-c support basically replaced my $300 dock, and it only cost about $100 more than the cheaper 4K monitors. Mine takes thunderbolt input, provides one usb-c port, and 4 usb-3 ports. Daisy chaining is supported, but note that you can't run 2 4k@60hz monitors with peripherals on a single cable - see details below.

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Your setup needs will also depend on whether you plan to run two monitors with 4k@60hz.

I was trying to run a setup that would give me two secondary displays plus peripherals on a single thunderbolt cable, but the unfortunate reality is that it's just not fast enough.

Thunderbolt gets you ~40gb/s. A 4k@60hz monitor needs ~19gb/s, and a usb-3 hub will need another 10gb/s.

Two monitors + a hub means you need ~50gb/s and the connection just doesn't support that.

In windows things will almost always gracefully degrade (one monitor will drop to 4k@30hz). In linux... it's a bit of a grab bag depending on the order the devices are detected - Sometimes one monitor will fail to be discovered at all, sometimes usb devices will never be powered up, in some cases you'll see one (or sometimes both) monitors come up but no longer offer the correct resolutions.

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Once I realized I was hitting the throughput limits on the cable, I caved and moved to a setup that used two thunderbolt cables plugged into the laptop.

I'm fortunate that my work and personal machines both have two thunderbolt ports (mac work work, xps 13 for personal) and they can both be charged from the same cable.

what egpu do you have?