Yes, you read that correctly. The P8Z77-V Premium and the P8Z77-V Pro motherboards boast the Intel Thunderbolt certification making them the first Intel certified motherboards in the market to have the latest Thunderbolt connection interface.
The P8Z77-V Pro Premium is the name given to motherboards that are the top of the ASUS range with the latest technologies. The P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt offers the same technology but with some minor differences so people have more options to choose from and still get the chance to appreciate Thunderbolt.
So, I hear some of you asking, what is Thunderbolt exactly? It is a brand new and shiny high-speed I/0 technology designed for optimum performance, ease of use and it gives users more flexibility. It has incredibly fast transfer speeds.
And this is where I have to be careful of biting my keyboard out of Want. Yes, I Want this. You see, standard USB 3.0 gives you fast data transfers and interaction. It’s good and it’s useful and it does what we have all been nagging for. Now Thunderbolt has marched in and taken this up to two times faster than USB 3.0. Twice as fast!
If you have USB 2.0, then the speed of Thunderbolt is even more dramatic with an increase of up to 20 times. When it was first released in 2000, USB 2.0 was the Big Thing in high-speed transfer. Then came USB 3.0 in 2008 – it still feels really recent – which took transmission speeds up to 5Gbit/s and was up to 10 times faster than 2.0.
Today you are looking at Thunderbolt which has been around since 2011 and merges PCI Express and DisplayPort into a serial data interface or at a discharge of lightning. Your call really, although the latter is not compatible with the modern motherboard as yet. Perhaps ASUS has that planned for the future…
The Thunderbolt option has simultaneous bi-directional 10Gbps transfer speeds over a single cable and you can daisy-chain (love that description) up to six Thunderbolt devices with a single connection for a clutter-free computing experience.
You can connect multiple Thunderbolt-enabled external storage drives to an enabled display and transfer files while watching movies and you won’t get any lag. How tasty…
In short, the advantages of Thunderbolt over USB are clear with additional speed, more flexibility, less lag and reduced clutter. But what else do these motherboards have that makes them worth the investment? Find out on Thursday…
Tamsin