Thunderbolt is really an unsung hero here. It is surprisingly nice to be able to move various components around my desk that would have otherwise sat in a huge tower hogging all the PCIe slots they can find.
replyAgreed, I've been doing experiments and it's wild to me what "just works" in a secondhand eGPU case or music production PCIe boxes.
replyDual 10G NIC cards, way cheaper than a comparable dongle 36 HDDs in JBOD, absolutely! 12 optical drives, sure!
The Thunderbolt offerings on the current Mac lineup offer dramatically less bandwidth in total if that matters for a given use case. Thunderbolt 5 is the equivalent of PCI-E Gen 4 x4. So if all 4 of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on a Mac Studio can run at full speed, that's still only the equivalent of a single gen 4 x16 slot. That's less than half the bandwidth of a basic consumer x86 CPU, to say nothing of the Xeon that was in the previous Intel Mac Pro or a modern Epyc/Threadripper (Pro).
replyThis is a big reason why things like eGPUs kinda suck. Thunderbolt is fast for external I/O, but it's quite pathetic compared to internal PCI-E.
Reports as pointed out here have shown that x4 to x16 for most GPUs and common loads is a 1% to 10% loss of performance - hardly pathetic. In many (gaming) cases, it would be unnoticeable.
replyThe DAD AX32/AX64 is such a thing.
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