Ports

MrAlbertrocks · January 6, 2017

I'm the type of guy who connects his peripherals in the first port he sees. I've never really paid attention to the ports, i don't care if it's USB 3.0, 3.1, and I've never noticed any difference between them. Am i missing out on something? And what is Thunderbolt 3 and in what situation would i use it? I'm interested now because of the new motherboards coming out, i see a lot of people excited over them and i really have no idea why.

tt2468 · January 6, 2017

6 minutes ago, MrAlbertrocks said:

I'm the type of guy who connects his peripherals in the first port he sees. I've never really paid attention to the ports, i don't care if it's USB 3.0, 3.1, and I've never noticed any difference between them. Am i missing out on something? And what is Thunderbolt 3 and in what situation would i use it? I'm interested now because of the new motherboards coming out, i see a lot of people excited over them and i really have no idea why.

If you haven't used tb3, you aren't missing out. You need a thunderbolt device to take advantage of thunderbolt 3. If it doesn't say thunderbolt in big letters all over the packaging, it is not a thunderbolt device. Newer USB standards are mostly for increased transfer speeds (like for external storage or network adapters). If you are just using thumb drives or peripherals like you say, you should not be missing out on much.

laquine · January 6, 2017

If you want to take advantage of faster transfer speed devices that use 3.0 or 3.1, then you plug into those ports, however any usb device will work in any standard type A connector. It all just depends on speeds. As for Thunderbolt, it's a technology developed by Intel for much faster transfer speeds than usb. However it's not as popular as usb since its really only exclusive to Apple devices unless you have a compatible motherboard and CPU. Thunderbolt can be handy if you just want to have one single plug into the back of your computer and then you run all of you other connections such as usb, audio, ethernet, hdmi, displayport, etc, through a thunderbolt hub. Although with the new usb 3.1 standard, you pretty much do the same with that as well.

TLDR:

They're all just connectors for the various input/output devices. All depends on what you have and what you want to do with them.