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, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.