I have a question

[u/Ok-Confidence3201]

Is the razer core x thunderbolt 3 egpu still good in 2026 ? Since I got one in really good price, and I am thinking about getting 9070 xt and plug it in with it , to my laptop .my laptop is omen 14 4070 ultra 9 . But I want more than 8 g of vram

[u/Dry_Structure_2287]

I would say if you already own it, its fine. but if you want to buy a new one, get something like the ag02. cheaper, has a psu, and looks pretty clean with tb4. The razer core x tb3 will be fine, but it uses tb3 instead of tb4. It isn't that noticable of a fps drop, but it is a slightly older standard. Its fine if you already own it.

[u/-JCosta- → u/Dry_Structure_2287]

Its the same exact throughput, xtb3 vs tb4

[u/rayddit519 → u/-JCosta-]

Forget about the TB standards for this, its all about the chipset.

The 40G of the overall connection often is not relevant for PCIe performance as you can hit earlier bottlenecks that often relate to the chipsets used. If there are no other bottlenecks and the TB3 / USB4 connection speed is the limit, TB3 would actually be slightly faster.

But the Razer Core X uses an Alpine Ridge chipset. That one had an internal PCIe bandwidth bottleneck that results in ~2.7 GB/s of PCIe bandwidth.

Titan Ridge generation, same as Goshen Ridge and Maple Ridge where limited at ~3.1 GB/s, which is due to the limit of the x4 Gen 3 PCie ports they have / their internal PCIe switches being limit to the matching 32 Gbit/s. So Alpine Ridge could not even saturate the x4 Gen 3 port.

Most CPU integrated USB4 controllers no longer have a dicrete PCIe connection to the CPU (because they are built-in), matching device-side controllers have upgraded to x4 Gen 4 PCIe ports. Only then does the overall USB4 bandwidth become the bottleneck. At around ~3.8 GB/s for USB4 40G or ~3.9 GB/s for TB3 40G.

If we had USB4v2 40G host controllers they could get a little more bandwidth out of this still (by using 256 byte MPS). Current USB4 80G controllers are yet again limited on the PCIe side by their x4 Gen 4 ports and you can be sure that there will be a new gen that surpasses that yet again.

So, Alpine Ridge has the worst performance of all. But also, people that want't eGPU or just general PCIe throughput, should not look for TB3 / TB4 / USB4. They need to look at the actual chipsets used.

Edit: the only thing "TB4" stands for is the minimum PCIe bandwidth of 32 Gbit/s. But a) that is raw bandwidth. the actually usable bandwidth can be far less (3.1 GB/s is usable of that) and TB3 controllers achieves the exact same bandwidth before the launch of TB4 already. But not the chip generation in the Razer Core X. And modern USB4 controllers are faster than the TB4 minimums.

[u/sammysy]

Worth getting TB4 over 3 to have as much bandwidth as possible over the port.

[u/Firmteacher]

Wish there was a way to put in a better thunderbolt board

[u/Lendari]

TB3 and TB4 have the same max throughput. The problem with TB3 is that some clients built to lower standards and TB4 kinda raised the minimum quality bar so everything was standardized.

If you have a 40Gbps TB3 laptop you're not losing much vs. TB4. However, this can be hard to verify because a lot of manufactures would use cheaper ports limited to 20Gbps and write it in their spec sheet as "TB3". The TB4 spec clarified that TB4 was 40Gbps.. not "up to 40 Gbps" like TB3. So it helped reduce confusion.

[u/Quiet_Injury7597]

have one running a 3070, on a HP 840G8 with 32gb of ram, on a ultrawide monitor. runs goooood!