Intel’s Thunderbolt 5 might be the best USB-C cable ever, with 120Gbps of single-direction bandwidth, 240 watts of power, and enough oomph to drive external SSDs, eGPUs, and high-resolution, high-refresh-rate monitors from a single cable at unheard-of levels. But first, it’d have to ship! Today, Cable Matters is shipping the first three certified Thunderbolt 5 cables, which bring us one big step closer to something practical instead of theoretical.
The first Thunderbolt 5 cables are here, but there’s barely anything to plug in
Even $4,500 Razer laptop owners probably can’t justify it yet.
Even $4,500 Razer laptop owners probably can’t justify it yet.
is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Available today from Amazon in 1-foot (0.3m), 1.6-foot (0.5m), and 3.3-foot (1m) lengths for $23, $27, and $33, respectively, the new cables obviously don’t do anything on their own — you’d need a computer with a Thunderbolt 5 port and a dock or accessory of some sort to get some real use out of it.
But as of today, the only laptop we’ve heard of with a Thunderbolt 5 port is the Razer Blade 18, and even there, it’s not guaranteed. You’d have to buy the $4,500 Mercury edition of the laptop to get that port. (You do also get an Intel i9 and a mobile RTX 4090 for the money.)
And unless you own two of those laptops, there’s still probably nothing special you can do with a Thunderbolt 5 cable as of today because the peripherals we saw at CES aren’t yet ready: Belkin, J5Create, OWC, and Sabrent do not yet list any of those Thunderbolt 5 products on their websites, and Hyper still shows its $400 dock as being out of stock with a “Sign up to be notified” button.
But if you do have two of the exact same $4,500 Razer laptops, could you use Thunderbolt Share to transfer files between them at ludicrous speed? Inquiring minds want to know. If not, I suppose you could use it as a USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 cable for now.
According to Cable Matters’ press release, its cable is manufactured by Lintes, the same company that provided the prototype cable we saw at CES.
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