My first Thunderbolt 5 experience has been a huge bust

Thunderbolt 5 was announced about a year ago as the next step in the evolution of the Thunderbolt I/O standard.

The extra bandwidth plays right into the gaming and productivity space.

Docks are still scarce, and only two notebooks to my knowledge ship with a (non-integrated) Thunderbolt 5 controller, a version of the Razer Blade and the Maingear ML-17.

Maingear ’s laptop produced an image on just two of the displays plus the laptop itself.

While one laptop rendered at 4 K 144Hz just fine, it was a real struggle to get the other to do the same at 1440p .

Streaming a 4 K, 60Hz video stuttered badly when run on the external display that was connected to the Thunderbolt dock.

The wildly varying results, including heavy stuttering while playing video, told me something’s not quite right.

Intel has cycled through its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake launches, and neither includes an integrated Thunderbolt 5 controller.

An updated driver could potentially solve this problem or it might require a more sophisticated hardware revision to Intel 's Barlow Ridge controller.