LisLax USB4 Thunderbolt 4 Cable User Guide
- June 16, 2024
- LisLax
Table of Contents
LisLax USB4 Thunderbolt 4 Cable
Specifications
- Product Name: Thunderbolt 4/3 USB4 Type C Cable
- Brand: Lislax Technology
- Power Supply Capacity: Primary Port – 98W, Other Ports – Not more than 15W
- Bandwidth: Thunderbolt/USB4 – Up to 40Gbps
Product Usage Instructions
Thunderbolt Docking Station
The Thunderbolt Docking Station is an all-in-one device that provides
powerful bandwidth transmission capability. The USB C port acts as a bridge
for various data packets. The docking station supports Thunderbolt/USB4
technology and offers a peak bandwidth of up to 40Gbps. When transmitting
DisplayPort, PCIe, or USB 3.X simultaneously, the DisplayPort data packets
will have priority.
Note: The thunderbolt port of the docking station is connected to the computer and has a primary and secondary port. The primary port is indicated by a circle in the left figure above. Only the computer connected to this port can see all the devices connected to the docking station. The docking station provides 98W charging capacity to the primary port while other ports have a power supply capacity of not more than 15W.
You can connect other laptops (B) to the secondary USB C port and form a thunderbolt networking LAN by connecting laptops (B) and host (A).
Display
To understand display options, it is important to know the input interface
types of monitors available on the market. Here are the main HD interfaces:
HDMI
HDMI is the most common interface and has different standards and
specifications. Here are some examples:
- 1080p: Full HD with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels
- 4K: Four times the resolution of Full HD, with a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels
- 8K: Sixteen times the resolution of Full HD, with a resolution of 7680×4320 pixels
Method 1: If your monitor is connected to a docking station like CalDigit TS4 docking, you can use a DP to HDMI converter along with an HDMI cable that matches the corresponding specifications.
DisplayPort (DP)
If your monitor supports a DP interface, you can use a USB C to DP
converter. Make sure to use a DP cable that matches the required
specifications.
USB C
If your monitor has a USB C interface with a thunderbolt icon (e.g.,
Samsung tu87f series 32 inch 4K UHD Pro monitor), it can be directly connected
and displayed.
How to operate on PC?
On Windows 10
- After connecting the display monitor, you can switch between different displays and display modes using keyboard shortcut keys. You can also manage multiple displays through the “Settings” menu by navigating to “Display” and making changes such as adjusting the resolution.
- If you experience performance issues after connecting an external monitor, check if your GPU has enough power. You can do this by checking the GPU occupancy rate in the task manager.
On Apple MacOS:
In MacOS, the main display and external display can have different screens
or resolutions. If the “Mirror” option is selected, both displays will show
the same content and resolution. When selecting the second display, you can
set its resolution and other options separately.
FAQ
-
Q: Can I connect multiple Thunderbolt Docking Stations together?
A: No, connecting multiple Thunderbolt Docking Stations together is not recommended as it may cause compatibility and performance issues. -
Q: What is the maximum resolution supported by the Thunderbolt 4/3 USB4 Type C Cable?
A: The maximum resolution supported depends on the capabilities of your connected devices. Please refer to the user manual or specifications of your devices for more information.
Thunderbolt 4/3 USB4 Type C Cable
Lislax Technology Make life better
- Thunderbolt is a technical protocol. The version has been developed to thunderbolt 4. The devices that support it generally have thunderbolt marks, which is a patented technology of Intel. USB4 is developed by the USB-IF on the basis of the thunderbolt 3 that has been publicly authorized by Intel. USB4 is the latest technical protocol of the USB-IF. Those companies that are not authorized by Intel thunderbolt 4, such as AMD, support USB 4 with zen3 +. The highest specifications of thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 are generally the same, but the minimum specifications of thunderbolt 4 are higher than USB4 (the USB-IF is open to various manufacturers to have different implementations according to needs), Moreover, the test indicators of thunderbolt are relatively strict, and it can be understood that USB4 is an open source version of thunderbolt 4. However, thunderbolt 4, USB4 and USB 3.2 all use USB type C (hereinafter referred to as USB C) as the physical interface carrier, that is, different technologies under the same physical carrier.
- Thunderbolt technology is widely used in Intel CPU based computers and Apple computers. The advantage of the physical interface of USB C is that the data channels are quite abundant, which facilitates high-speed data transmission and becomes the most universal and excellent interface.
- Thunderbolt USB C Cable is not just a bunch of metal wire, it has some chips inside to support and match the communication and charging of both sides.
Thunderbolt Docking Station
All in one. The specifications of LisLax are as follows
Thunderbolt/USB4 technology provides powerful bandwidth transmission capability. USB C is like a bridge, through which a variety of data packets pass. Each channel has a peak bandwidth, but the combined bandwidth will not exceed 40Gbps. When DisplayPort, PCIe or USB 3.X are transmitted at the same time, DisplayPort data packet transmission will take priority.
Take CalDigit TS4 as an example
Docking is connected to the thunderbolt USB C main port on the PC, which not
only supplies the power charging of the PC but also in charge of the high-
speed data transmission, which simplifies the connection of the PC. Docking
can bring some devices, such as storage, eGPU, personalized keyboard and
mouse, display, high-speed network adapter, SDCARD, etc. In addition to
supporting thunderbolt standard devices, it also supports USB4, USB 3 and
other backward compatibility.
Take CalDigit TS4 as an example
Docking is connected to the thunderbolt USB C main port on the PC, which not
only supplies the power charging of the PC but also in charge of the high-
speed data transmission, which simplifies the connection of the PC. Docking
can bring some devices, such as storage, eGPU, personalized keyboard and
mouse, display, high-speed network adapter, SDCARD, etc. In addition to
supporting thunderbolt standard devices, it also supports USB4, USB 3 and
other backward compatibility.
Other laptops B can be connected to the secondary USB C, and laptops B and host A are connected to form a thunderbolt networking LAN.
Display
To understand display, you must first understand the input interface types of
displays monitor on the market. Currently, there are mainly the following HD
interfaces on the market:
HDMI
As the most common interface, HDMI is also subdivided into different standards
and corresponding specifications of wires.
1080p – Also known as Full HD, this means there are 1920 pixels displayed across the screen horizontally and 1080 vertically.- 4K – This has 3,840 horizontal pixels and 2160 vertical pixels …this is around 4 times that of Full HD.
- 8K – This gives a resolution of 7680 by 4320… that’s four times that of 4K and 16 times that of full HD!
HDMI wire specification:
HDMI 1.4
- Bandwidth = 10.2 Gbps
- Can run at 1080p at 60Hz or 4k at 30Hz
HDMI 2.0
- Bandwidth = 18 Gbps
- Can run at 1080p 240Hz or 4k at 60Hz
- HDMI 2.1 (ALSO KNOWN AS ULTRA-HIGH SPEED)
- Bandwidth = 48 Gbps
- Can run at 4k at 120Hz or 8k at 60Hz
If the display monitor has only HDMI interface, to directly output video to the display monitor through USB C port.
Method 1
A USB C to HDMI converter in the figure below is required, and the USB C to
HDMI converter and the HDMI cable also need to match the corresponding
specifications. For example, the 8K HDMI cable wire is at least the HDMI 2.1
specification, and the high specification cable and interface are backward
compatible.
Method 2
If it is connected to docking like CalDigit TS4 docking, you can make use of
the DisplayPort interface of docking by using a DP to HDMI converter in the
figure below. At the same time, the converter and HDMI cable wire should also
match the above corresponding specifications.
DisplayPort(DP)
If the display monitor supports DP interface, you can use a USB C to DP converter like the right figure above. The corresponding wires should also match certain specifications.
USB C
If the display monitor has a USB C interface, and it has a thunderbolt icon
, such as Samsung tu87f series 32 inch 4K UHD Pro monitor, it can be directly
displayed.
How to
operate on PC?
On Windows 10 
After connecting the display monitor, you can switch different displays and
display modes through keyboard shortcut keys. You can manage multiple displays
through setting -> display menu, such as changing the resolution. 
If you find
that the operation is not as smooth as before after connecting the peripheral
monitor, please check whether your GPU is power enough. For example, check the
GPU occupancy rate of the task manager. 
On Apple MacOS
As shown in the above figure, the MacOS main display and the external display
use different screens (or different resolutions). If the “Mirror for” option
is set, the internal and external displays use the same content and the same
resolution.
When selecting the second display, you can set its resolution and other
options separately.
Please note
that thunderbolt 4 only support up to 2 external display monitors.
FAQ：
-
The 8K 60Hz bandwidth is up to 48Gbps, while the thunderbolt 4 standard is only 40Gbps, and not all the bandwidth in the 40Gbps is allocated to the DP channel. However, the thunderbolt 4 can transmit 8K 60Hz video up to 48Gbps?
Answer: It should be noted that 48Gbps is only the theoretical peak bandwidth, and the image is dynamic, and its bandwidth is also dynamic. For example, compared with the static image video, the bandwidth occupation is small, and the dynamic video has a relatively high bandwidth. The thunderbolt technology can adjust the output bandwidth according to the image change. Therefore, in general, thunderbolt can meet most 8K 60Hz video requirements. -
Can those non-standard resolutions and refresh rates be supported?
Answer: It supports. USB C cable only focuses on the maximum bandwidth not exceeding its upper limit, and it has nothing to do with the DisplayPort packet content.
Storage
The storage uses PCIe channel, and its peak bandwidth is 32Gbps, that is,
32Gbps / 8 = 4Gbyte per second.
SSD Storage
The storage capacity of the PC can be expanded by using thunderbolt external
SSD NVMe drive, as shown in the following figure:
The following
is our laboratory test data:
There are several factors that affect the transmission performance of SSD:
- Thunderbolt 4 is faster than thunderbolt 3. It is better to use Thunderbolt 4 equipment and wires than thunderbolt 3, such as Thunderbolt enclosure drive and PC. Because the PCIe channel of thunderbolt 3 is only 16Gbps, while the PCIe channel of thunderbolt 4 is 32Gbps
- PCIe version of NVMe, PCIe 4 has twice the performance of PCIe 3.
- For the memory bandwidth of PC side, try to use DDR5 memory.
- The local storage on the PC side should keep up with the performance of the external SSD, because the data read and written are generally written back to the local storage.
- Selection of operating system and file system.
- Enable Cache Setting.
- How to enable write caching on Windows 10:
- Connect your external storage device to the computer
- Right-click My Computer or This PC, and then click Manage.
- Select Device Manager.
- Expand Disk Drives.
- Right-click the drive on which you want to turn disk write caching on or off, and then click Properties.
- Click the Policies tab.
- Click to select “Better performance”
- Click to select “Enable write caching on the device”
- Click OK.
Direct-attached storage (DAS)
Compared with
network attached storage (NAS), by using thunderbolt USB C, the storage
transfer performance of DAS is far higher than that of the NAS with only
1Gbps. The DAS itself generally has multiple slots built in and is presented
to the PC as a single storage through the internal hardware RAID technology.
In addition, multiple DAS can present multiple storage on the PC with Daisy
Chain technology. You can also merge multiple DAS storage disks into one disk
through software RAID.
Power Charging
Our LisLax cable supports 240W charging, but it needs to match the capabilities of the connected devices, and it is also limited by the capabilities of both ends. Here are charging protocol lists supported by LisLax:
Power Delivery 3.1(PD3.1)
Type C 2.1
When both ends of the cable support the above two protocols, the cable has the
application conditions to give full play to its 240W, that is, supports up to
48V/5A.
Quick Charge 4.0: when the connected device is QC4.0 standard, it supports
high-power charging of up to 100W.
eGPU
eGPU is External Graphics Processing Unit. It means that a graphics card
doesn’t mount on PC’s main board slot directly, instead, it connects to PC via
USB C 
Why do I need eGPU? Application scenario:
- When the performance of PC built-in graphics card cannot meet the demand
- Flexible replacement of different graphics cards
- Handheld game machine running 3A games
- Perform advanced AI Artificial Intelligence operations or training
eGPU solution can solve those problem, because eGPU uses 32Gbps PCIe channel. But using an external GPU doesn’t give you the same performance as it would if you had the same GPU mounted internally. How much performance do you lose, then? Estimates put the loss at around 10 to 15 percent.
Please note that Apple M1 and M2 series do not support external GPU.
Thunderbolt Networking
Thunderbolt networking means that two PCs are connected through USB C, and
then the two PCs automatically form a TCP / IP LAN. Thunderbolt technology
will automatically assign LAN IP addresses to both ends. 
The figure above, we used iperf in the laboratory to obtain the highest transmission speed through multi-threaded testing. The results show that the LAN transmission of up to 20Gbps is 20 times that of ordinary gigabit RJ45 network cable. Why to use multithreading test? Because iperf consumes CPU resources, a single thread cannot fully utilize 20Gbps bandwidth.
How to use thunderbolt networking?
After using USB C to connect two laptops, a new network connection and IP
address will be automatically generated on both sides of the PC after a few
seconds.
On Windows
First check the IP addresses of the network connections of both side, and then
test whether they are connected by cmd ping.
IP based access application is widely used. One of the common applications is
network neighborhood or Samba / CIFS protocol to share the disks of the other
side. For example, the connected laptop is divided into A (assuming its IP is
169.254.1.100) and B (assuming its IP is 169.254.1.200). On laptop B, Windows
10 “My Computer” device can share directory and account password information.
On laptop A, through “My Computer”, enter \\169.254.1.200 in the address bar
to access.
Another common application is remote desktop, which makes it easy to manage
another laptop.
On MacOS
You can find
the network interface in the settings. Thunderbolt bridge is the network
connection automatically generated by the system.
Daisy Chain
It refers to interconnecting multiple devices with thunderbolt USB C interfaces, provided that the intermediate interconnected devices have at least two thunderbolt USB C interfaces, as shown in the following figure:
- It must be noted that the display must be placed at the end of the interconnection. The maximum number of interconnected devices is 6, and the maximum number of displays is 2. Daisy Chain intermediate interconnection nodes are a bit like hubs in the network.
- Its common applications are DAS and multi – display
Smart phone interconnection
At present, most mobile phones do not support thunderbolt or USB4 standards. When two smart phones are connected, LisLax USB C cable is downgraded to USB 3.x or even USB 2(depend on the smart phone). At this time, one side can charge the other side or share one its storage to the other side for access.
For example, for Android, you can find relevant options in the drop-down menu, such as setting reverse charging or file transfer.
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