Image: Adam Patrick Murray/Foundry
It’s been a long road, getting from there to here. “There” being full, official support for high-speed USB4 data transfers on an AMD-powered laptop, and “here” being the day that we can finally use it. Gordon’s finally got his hands on just such a laptop, the latest Razer Blade 14 with an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU. And it has USB4 support out of the box, no beta motherboard BIOS update required.
Testing commences, including a 10-gig Ethernet adapter (Thunderbolt 3), SanDisk G-Drive (Thunderbolt 3), OWC MiniStack hub with a 2TB M.2 drive mounted (Thunderbolt 4), a Razer Core X external GPU with an RTX 3080 (Thunderbolt 3 again), and (drumroll!) a pre-production ZikeDrive USB4 external enclosure. CrystalDiskMark is showing it almost immediately hitting the maximum 3.8Gbps read and write speeds, surpassing some of the fastest Thunderbolt 3 enclosures.
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Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.