As per the title. Will you consider TB 3 is a must when you want to purchase a laptop now. I have a dilemma, whether to get TB3 or just get a laptop with DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.0. Spending extra RM 1000 make sense ? original budget is 3.5k-4k.

Refer to this if you interested in my previous discussion: https://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopic=4869826

is the TB3 2 lane or 4 lane on the laptop youre looking at?
if its 4 lane, that gives you more room for utilising eGPUs which is the main use case for TB3 on laptops right now imo.
i got myself a Lenovo 730s with 2x 4-lane TB3 ports so that i can utilise the technology in the future; leaves room for futureproofing (somewhat).
nevertheless, TB3 is a great piece of technology if you're keen on getting a dock and having a one cable solution, great for transporting between workplaces.

Hi there, it seems you know the ports well. I was doing research for the past weeks, where i surprised to find Lenovo T490 offer TB3 just under 4000. More refer to this Lenovo T490

But fortunately, i digged deeper and found out this review by notebook check under "Gaming Performance" which it stated "The Thunderbolt 3 port that Lenovo has included only utilises two lanes of PCIe, which is not enough to get decent performance from an external GPU". More details: >> T490

So is the laptop i mentioned earlier worth buying ?

Even it's 4 lane it doesn't worth buying .
You shouldn't pick a laptop base one port it have . It same like picking car by how many doors it have .

I think most TB3 laptops right now aren't worth buying if you're solely buying it to use the technology. The use cases are too little for the price premium and the technology is still in its infancy. But DELL computers are pretty well rounded; I personally can't justify the price premium over similar (and sometimes better) offerings by companies like Lenovo

There's the Yoga S740 14.... with soldered RAM (8GB option only in Mal., LPDDR4)...Icelake.... with TB3...at 3.3k...thermals are not that good however, even with 2 fans & heatpipes (according to review). Phenomenal battery-life though...

This post has been edited by BeastX: Dec 1 2019, 02:57 PM

Reduced price being last year's product....though a good RM 1k price premium would be the 4k panel used.

Depends how you use it. Some ppl use it for external nvme ssd.

I personally don't suggest using tb3 for external gpu, performance drops too much.

The 4k monitor is tempting. With that price. But I gonna use another 4k external monitor as the main one. Which meant I will off the laptop monitor and only use external 4k monitor. Will this still stress my stress my gpu?

For display only, should not be an issue.... I regularly push 2x 4k@60Hz with 620 igpu....that Dell could push 2x 4k@60Hz together with its own 4k screen....that is almost 25Mpixels...

You would not be able to game at 4k. Gaming , encoding and decoding codecs (Bitcoin mining/protein folding/CUDA/ OpenCL) will be the activities that stress the GPU.

This post has been edited by BeastX: Dec 1 2019, 07:33 PM

Personally speaking, the future is so so jauh unless you're despo to really use the e-GPU tech

unless you have a monstrous CPU like an i9-9900K in your laptop nothing will be really-completely futureproof your future GPU, and that's is discounting how expensive a new GPU and an e-GPU enclosure are

It's a must have for mac users cause they have no choice, that's all

Yes, and No.

See which laptop you getting.
For example if you get Dell XPS13 / Huawei Macbook Pro, it doesn't have many I/O ports.
It power charging, external display, (might as well audio-port) will be using USB-C.
So you wan to get thunderbolt ports if you want to power-up multiple display at 1080p or above.

Might too late, but suggest you wait for the new Dell XPS13.

This post has been edited by yeo1992cc: Jan 7 2020, 06:29 PM