This post is more than 5 years old
7 Posts
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13398
XPS 13/15 9530, 9550, 9630 can only reach Thunderbolt 2 speeds over Thunderbolt 3 port.
Hi,
I myself own an XPS 15 9550 and noticed that I was not getting the full Thunderbolt 3 speed
over it's Thunderbolt 3 port. I expected speeds around 2700MB/s, because of the overhead with
the theoretical gross speed of 3870MB/s, but I only ever got 1400MB/s out of it.
I did some digging and found out that none of the XPS notebooks with Thunderbolt 3 are even
able to achieve the full TB3 speeds, because they are only connected with two PCI Express lanes (x2.3).
You can read more about this on the following links:
Dell Subreddit Post
Chipset Digging on Forum
Thunderbolt 3 and the promised speeds were the MAIN REASON I even bought this notebook.
I feel very cheated here.
N1cksys
4 Posts
0
July 12th, 2017 21:00
Class action!
hip2b2
5 Posts
0
July 31st, 2017 21:00
Would you know if this issue has been resolved in more recent XPS 13 9360 laptops? I am still within the return period of my laptop (purchased at Costco so it is extended) and I hate being taken for a dope on general principal.
Thanks
hip
splitframe
7 Posts
0
August 1st, 2017 02:00
There is an official list with the link speed of all models here: www.dell.com/.../thunderbolt-3-40gbps-data-transfer-rate
samos1111
489 Posts
0
August 1st, 2017 02:00
> Would you know if this issue has been resolved in more recent XPS 13 9360 laptops? I am still within the return period of my laptop (purchased at Costco so it is extended) and I hate being taken for a dope on general principal.
As explained by James McMinn, you can get the full 40Gbps TB3 speed when connecting two external 4K@60Hz displays over DP, plus some PCIe traffic. Unfortunately, PCIe traffic is indeed restricted to 2xPCIe (2x8Gbps). This restriction is practically bothersome only in quite specific use-cases. For instance, with external GPU (which are actually not officially supported), or if you would want to connect a fast NVMe SSD externally.
Mind also that TB3 sounds advanced and hyper-cross-compatible but is in practice still a half-backed technology with plenty of compatibility issues even among devices of the same vendor (recall TB15).