The world’s first Thunderbolt 5 cable has just been unleashed, with Cable Matters unveiling its new Thunderbolt 5 cable that enjoys its full 120Gbps of bandwidth and 240W of charging… starting from just $23.
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Cable Matters’ new Thunderbolt 5 cable is manufactured by Lintes Technology and is available from Cablle Matters’ own Amazon store. The 1ft cable costs $22.99, the 1.6ft cable costs $26.99, and finally, the largest 3.3ft cable costs $32.99.
Thunderbolt 5 has a single standard, so you will enjoy the full specs, bandwidth, and power of Thunderbolt 5 no matter the cable length. This includes 120Gbps of uni-directional bandwidth, up to 80Gbps of bidirectional bandwidth, up to 240W of power delivery, and backward compatibility with Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 3 Type-C ports (as well as USB4 and USB Type-C).
The new Thunderbolt 5 standard was unveiled last year, and will debut inside of Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra 200 series “Arrow Lake” CPUs later this year. Thunderbolt 5 is based on the USB4 version 2.0 standard, which means you’ll have all of the features of USB, but then there’s a beautiful Thunderbolt 5-exclusive feature called “Bandwidth Boost Mode” that is very exciting.
Thunderbolt 5’s new Bandwidth Boost Mode goes above and beyond USB4 V2.0’s maximum 80Gbps bandwidth limit, cranking up to a mind-boggling 120Gbps of bandwidth (which is for displays only). This was achieved by switching three of the four 40Gbps lanes to transmit mode, boosting total bandwidth from 80Gbps to 120Gbps in one direction, but limiting the receiving connection to 40Gbps.
This means that Thunderbolt 5 can support multiple 8K displays, and up to 4K 540Hz, 8K 120Hz, and everything in between. Thunderbolt 5 and its huge 120Gbps bandwidth means it has 50% more bandwidth than the new DisplayPort 2.1 standard, which is an incredible thing to see.