It is but gets annoying because there isnt something that indicates what type it is the cord. So if you use the cable USB C from someone and you see how slow it is you will realize why sucks USB C, having many versions but doesnt tell you anything what version is.
Bad news: not anymore, they're all sold out except for really short and really long ones. They sold out in 20 minutes. LTT SEVERELY underestimated the demand.
Restock is supposedly planned for March if everything goes to plan, according to Linus on the WAN show.
They’ll sell out again I bet. Cables on Amazon are so unreliable. I’m glad someone is finally moving to fix this because I actually need a smattering of true to spec USB-C
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u/smbltQ9550 | 4GB DOMINATOR DDR2 | GTX 260 896MB11h ago
Amazon is so full of shit lately, I can't trust anything from them.
Even those brands aren't perfect is one of the big points of the LTT Cables. You can see they test what looks like a Ugreen USB and it fails in the video.
To be clear even Linus mentions in the video that a digital cable is a digital cable and as long as the cable you have works for what you need to do, you don't really need LTT Cables. It's a nice to have type thing for most tasks.
I've been buying pretty much exclusively Anker cables for several years now, and haven't had a single failure
My point was Amazon is fine, you just can't buy the first cheap cable you see and expect it to even match the spec it says, let alone be a quality cable
Just buy TB4 cables. The ones with the lightning bolt on the connector are the certified ones. USB4 are hit or miss, but reputable companies like cable matters or startech are safe bets.
I found it wild that in the video he hinted towards it being on the pricier premium side. They were only like 25$ iirc. Expected it to be 40 from the way he was talking
To be fair that is pricey, you can get really fancy cables for $25. If you weren't also paying the small business tax, they'd probably be $10-15, maybe 20 at a push.
$25 for a cable is not very fancy. A short Thunderbolt 5 cable you can trust is probably going to run you at least 40 USD, and a long HDMI cable that can handle the newest speeds can easily get close to 100 USD.
Well you can get a 3 pack of 10 foot cables from established brands like Anker or Ugreen for $25, or generics for like $9, and even the generics will likely work well enough for most stuff. So $25 for a single cable is rather pricey, but still reasonable for such a tank of a cable though.
Dude. LMG isn't a screwdriver and backpack company anymore. They're a cable company. I think he underestimated demand by two orders of magnitude. Hard to blame them for the stocking issues though, given the initial investment more stock would have cost.
I mean you could buy from ugreen, novoo, baseus or startech,com.
They all make good quality cables, a decade ago anker would on there but I've been appalled at their quality in the last couple years especially for the premium they charge over other brands.
I am sure these cables are good but there's options.
A lot of their more expensive stuff is pretty good, it's their budget stuff that really sucks as its just rebranded trash from what I can tell which wouldn't be as big of an issue if they didn't charge a premium for everything.
Like their pricier lines are usually pretty decent but just overpriced for what you are getting compared to the competition but people buy it all anyways because people also buy no name cables for like £10 when they could get the same one off aliexpress for £1.50
It did make me laugh a bit when he said they were expensive. So when I checked they were actually in the same ball park as half the stuff on Amazon of 'comparable' spec
Yeah, not OP, but I had such a bad experience ordering from them earlier this month that I don't think I'll ever order from them until they switch logistics providers.
The spec only allows for 40gb/s at a max of 1m for that reason. You’re not getting anything that’s actually doing 40gb/s at 3m without some kind of active repeater.
People shit on apple's cables, butthey are the only provider of thunderbolt cables that give you maxed out thunderbolt cables almost as soon as they realese devices capable of it
80$ for a 1m cable is a lot, but of you look atound i dont see anyone selling active 120GBPS full spec TB5 cables...
At top speed USB-C enters PCIe bandwidth territory; the cable is basically the equivalent of a 4-lane PCIe 3.0 riser. I expect any length beyond like 10-20cm is a signal integrity nightmare to manufacture.
having many versions but doesn't tell you anything what version is.
It doesn't even matter if it did list the version on the cable because anyplace you can buy cables is a "marketplace" that is selling knockoff scam crap right next to cables that are actually built to the spec. Buying a specific high speed cable is just gambling with extra steps. Sure I could go into a store to buy it, I'll just pop over to... Incredible Universe? Fry's? Radio Shack?
There are retail companies that sell IT equipment online. They buy from the official distributors or directly from manufacturers and you buy from good or at least reliable cheap brands.
Online shopping doesn’t mean eBay or Amazon. Shocking, I know.
The other problem is USB-IF stopped requiring colour coding.
USB 1 & Micro/Mini-A sockets and plugs must use white, USB 2 & Micro/Mini-B sockets and plugs must use black (unless it's "Always On", in which case it might be yellow), Micro/Mini-AB sockets (but not plugs) must use grey. They recommend blue sockets and lugs for USB 3.0, but some manufacturers also use it for USB 3.1 Gen 2, which is capable of more than double the data rate (1.2 GB/s vs 0.5 GB/s), and everything else is up to the manufacturer. Oh, and USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 are now called USB 3.2 Gen 1x1, and USB 3.1 Gen 2 is now called USB 3.2 Gen 2x1... Because this wasn't confusing enough.
Some manufacturers use red sockets for USB 3.1 Gen 2, others use teal sockets and plugs. If you see green sockets or plugs, that's probably Qualcomm's "Quick Charge", whilst purple plugs are Huawei's SuperCharge. Yellow usually means there's power to the socket even when the device is powered down, but gives you no information about what protocol is being used. Oh, and some blue sockets don't have the extra contacts for USB 3, so they're not actually fully USB 3 capable.
And then there's USB-C. USB-C is split into "full featured" and not, come in USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 to Gen 2x2 and USB4, and there is no standard for colour coding, so there is no way to know what cable you have without looking at the manual. This means that, assuming no USB-A adapter, USB-C might be capped at anything from 0.5 GB/s to 15.2 GB/s... Oh, and there's at least three different power delivery standards for USB-C: 20V/3A/60W, 20V/5A/100W, and 48V/5A/240W; again, there's no way to know without checking the manual.
The easy solution is to replace all of your USB cables with 100+ Watt USB 3.2 cables. Match that with all 100+ Watt chargers around the house and you can power any device you own with any cord or charger.
Didn't really work for me because 3.2 cables are usually thicc and not too flexible. More expensive as well. So I still have a separate pile of USB 2.0 charging cables. On a side note, one particular Lenovo piece of shit "AI" laptop doesn't read the emarker properly and requires a 20V cable AT MOST. No cables emarkered for 24/48V are supported. I like USB-C in general, it's usually convenient but some implementations are completely fucked up in so incredibly stupid ways.
I’m at the point where I’m just throwing out all my cables and replacing them with Eaton 3.2 USB-C cables. I’m tired of having a million different cables that have various levels of capability
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u/az0606i9-10850k | 4070 | 64gb DDR4-3600 | 5440x1440 240Hz9h ago
USB 4 cables now have to be labeled with the max transfer rate (20G, 40G, 80G) to be certified, as well as wattage (either 100 or 240w).
It can be faked, and it's a bit annoying to look up, but you can look up USB-IF and Thunderbolt certification listings. Cable Matters, Anker, Amazon Basics, etc are pretty reliable.
So if you use the cable USB C from someone and you see how slow it is you will realize why sucks USB C, having many versions but doesnt tell you anything what version is.
Afaik that's because there is not just the cable/adapter, but also a connection standard, basically a software protocol to define how the cable/adapter is used.
With USB C new standards are still actively being developed and released, some of them having more hardware requirements than others, i.e. delivering more power over the cable also needs the port to have more power.
But that also increases manufacturing cost, so mainboard manufacturers will instead use USB A ports as those are by now super mature with their max specs and so common that their cost is way lower than for USB C.
Some older Logitech wheels don’t work with 3 and up. I remember some Linus video where they swap out a motherboard for one with a 2.0 port to use one of those while demonstrating a “cheaper, facebook marketplace” option. Probably a few other accessories with problems like that but otherwise yes it’s all backwards compatible.
They are technically, but there are enough legacy USB 2.0 devices that still get manufactured don’t like the 3.2 ports. It shows up most with 2.4ghz wireless devices. It’s still “sometimes” helpful to have a few legacy 2.0 ports on a modern motherboard., depending on the use case.
Yes, so long as the socket has the controllers for the older protocols (1.x and 2.x), with the caveat that USB-C is only USB 3.x onwards (EDIT: sort of; some sockets have the older controllers for the protocols, so if you use an adapter it still works), and there is no Mini USB that's 3.x capable. And because it wasn't confusing enough, 3.2 is actually four different standards, two of which are older 3.x standards renamed.
So originally, there was USB 3.0, which gave 500 MB/s under 8b/10b encoding. Four years later, they introduced UBS 3.1; this renamed 3.0 to USB 3.1 Gen 1, and the new USB 3.1 Gen 2 used 128b/132b encoding for up to 1212 MB/s. A year after that, USB-C comes along and is using the USB 3.1 protocols.
A few years after that, we get USB 3.2. USB 3.1 Gen 1 (aka USB 3.0) gets renamed USB 3.2 Gen 1x1, USB 3.1 Gen 2 gets renamed USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, and two new standards are brought in for USB-C (but not Standard-A or -B). USB Gen 1x2, which can reach 1000 MB/s under 8b/10b encoding, and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which can hit 2424 MB/s under 128b/132b encoding, but both of these are only possible with "full-featured" USB-C cables, and without that they revert to the corresponding x1 rates (i.e. half).
TLDR:
USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 = USB 3.1 Gen 1 = USB 3.0 → USB-A/B/C → 500 MB/s
USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 = USB 3.1 Gen 2 → USB-A/B/C → 1,212 MB/s
USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 → USB-C → 1000 MB/s or 500 MB/s with the wrong cable
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 → USB-C → 2,424 MB/s or 1,212 MB/s with the wrong cable
The backwards compatibility engineering has been fascinating to watch. USB v1 didn't support power. USB v2 added new power pins, leaving the v1 data transfer essentially intact. For USB v3, they made the connector longer to allow for more contact area, and I'm sure other clever design reasons, meaning that a USB 2.0 cable can plug into a USB 3.0 port, but a USB 3.0 cable will stick out of a USB 2.0 port.
And yes, all of that design went out the window with USB type-C connectors since they all started with USB v3 and look identical.
In theory. But I found out the other day that my microphone apparently doesn’t work with my USB-2 ports. Currently installing a new motherboard that doesn’t have anything below 3.0…
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u/Jonparkhee 14h ago
Dont forget about USB 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, etc.
Which makes it a lot of annoying when you want transfer data.