Can you use Thunderbolt 3 on an AMD Ryzen PC?

Thunderbolt is much more commonplace

Thunderbolt has been an Intel project going back many years, and in the earlier days, its most prominent use was by Apple. Thunderbolt 3 was a significant coming of age for Windows PCs, though, with the use of a USB-C port opening it up to a new world of machines.

But if you weren't using an Intel-powered machine, more than likely, you wouldn't have Thunderbolt 3. There were exceptions and Thunderbolt 4 is now much more commonplace on AMD Ryzen platforms. You can build a PC based on either AMD's Ryzen or Threadripper CPUs and have Thunderbolt ports. 

You won't find any Thunderbolt ports on more affordable AM4 motherboards, just USB-C ports. Thus, you'll need to pay a little more for the best motherboards. The ASUS ROG X570 VIII Crosshair Extreme has two, Gigabyte's B550 Vision D-P also has two, and even a Mini-ITX board like the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 has a Thunderbolt port.

Why is Thunderbolt better for devices?

The advantage to Thunderbolt is the incredible bandwidth that's possible down one single cable. Besides super-fast data transfers, you can hook up accessories such as docks, external high-res displays, external GPUs, and even daisy-chain together up to six devices.

What you're able to do with your PC is increased tenfold when utilizing a Thunderbolt port. Our own Senior Editor Cale Hunt has done an excellent breakdown of Thunderbolt vs. USB, noting how Thunderbolt 4 can handle at least two 4K displays at 60Hz or one 8K display at 30Hz.

Thunderbolt 4 speeds are also improved over Thunderbolt 3, bumping them from 16Gbps to 32Gbps. If you often use removable storage — like something from our best external hard drive collection — you should see theoretical transfer speeds up to about 3,000MB/s with Thunderbolt 4.