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I have been researching around online for most of the day but still coming up short on the answers that I am looking for so hoping that you fine people can help me. My thunderbolt version. Is this version 1 at 10gb?. I would have taken this as a yes had I not found conflicting information on a few sites stating that it could be TB2.I want to connect an EGPU to this MacBook. What are the best EGPU PCIE hubs for my TB version.What graphics card would you recommend for this. I would love to use one of the latest vega cards but there is no point if the age of the other hardware / TB version may throttle it. I don’t need current gen graphics anyway just something a lot better than the 650M that came with the machine.Can I use USBC with my thunderbolt version?. They have the same connector but unsure if the two are compatible on the earlier gen TB. All I could find online was a lot of references to TB3 and USBC.On a higher resolution IPS display 140mhz would using the TB port make any difference over using HDMI?. Thanks!
Yes you have Generation One of Thunderbolt. Which only offers a single pipe of 10 Gb/s. Generations two offers dual 10 Gb/s pipes which can be bonded together getting 20 Gb/s pipe. Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) offers 40 Gb/s across two 20 Gb/s pipes. Here’s a good write up that gets much deeper Thunderbolt interface We are talking about the road not the ability of the car/truck driving down the road is able to do. That gets into what the given device is able to drive and what the receiving device is able to absorb. While there was a few eGPU boxes created quite a few years ago for TB1 they are not being sold any more. They also where very limited as you needed to use an external display in a daisy chain setup Mac > eGPU > Display. This was needed as the limits of the 10 Gb/s pipe couldn’t carry the data stream back to the Mac. Even TB2 was limited as 4k data flows need a bigger pipe than 10 Gb/s (for online game play). So the short answer here is you’ll need to look on eBay for one of these older units and don’t expect a clean 4k feed. TB1 & TB2 use the miniDP connector which uses a different signaling method than TB3 which uses the same connector as USB-C. As for the newer TB3 eGPU’s you’ll need to upgrade your system to a newer model to use them they are not useable with older TB1 or TB2 systems. Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C are not the same! The only thing they share is the connector which was done to pressure the USB-C folks into supporting TB3 and many USB-C device makers do now! So you do need to make sure if the device supports TB3 signaling.
