Just wondering. If the new Apple $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable is used to connect a Surface Pro 8 Thunderbolt 4 port to a powered hub, will it improve the operation of Gig performer?
What do you mean with improving configuration? The price of the cable does not matter. Technically an official thunderbolt 4 cable should be good enough to connect thunderbolt devices. Apple usually adds premium tax. What hub do you have and what is your issue with GP?
It does in this case. The Apple cable has amazing technology in the plugs in each end.
Apple’s $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable could be worth it, as seen in X-ray CT scans
It helps if you see what’s deep inside $10, $5, and even $4 USB-C cables.
Sorry, I seem to have lost the web site where three guys discuss the layered scans of the cable
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I saw that article in Spanish. They are comparing apple (no pund intended to orange) TB4 vs usb type c (3.2, 3.1, and even 2.0) if you can share the same comparison with similar TB4 cables, i will appreciate it
Well, as i said. That comparison is so wrong. But if you think it can help your set-up , feel free to try that cable. You haven’t explained what your issue is
I personaly think, you should just buy this cable.
We could of course try to explain why Gig Performer won’t behave the slightest bit diffrent, why any other cable with TB4 specifications might do the same job or why even a TB3 cable would be more than sufficient for the intended purpose, but you will most probably always carry a good portion of doubts in the rear of your mind, if this special cable couldn’t have been “the saviour” when any issues should arise.
That’s why i propose that you just buy it, since it brings you in a “safe position”, knowing that you have bought the probably best cable you can get for money (aside from any “reasonable arguments”).
Do it! 
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I agree that good quality cables can give some piece of mind, but i would assume that he is connecting a surface tablet (idk if the version supports thunderbolt to be honest) to a TB Dock with a cheap usb cable. If that is the case, then we can not blame the cable, as it is not intended for TB Connecitity. Any known and well recognized cable manufacturer should be able to provide good performance. Not only apple cables.
I have two TB3 ports on my Lenovo P17 laptop. One is connected to the Lenovo ThinkPad Workstation port extender (with a bunch of different things plugged into it, including an external display connected that uses the separate nVidia graphics controller) and the other is connected to my Samsung 2 TB TB3 samples SSD. I continue to be amazed at the amount of data that can be processed without a single hiccup.
What does TB4 give you that TB3 can’t/doesn’t? I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d need more i/o capacity than I already have.
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That’s exactly it!
TB3 has the same 40GB/s specification as TB4. There is no actual reason to use such a cable!
Btw: AFAIK the devices on both ends of the cable must support TB4 to have that kind of cable make sense…
(But Al seems to be so very focussed on that amzing Apple technology, that’s why i proposed to just buy it. → peace of mind)
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I don’t have any issues. My setup is running fine. However, I should have explained why the cable caught my eye.
I have all my VSTs, Gig files and rackspaces stored on a 1TB micro SD card on the powered hub. So, when GP loads a gig file or rackspace, the sd card is where the data is loaded from. I am presently using a Thunderbolt 3 cable to connect my Surface Pro 8 to the hub where the SD card is housed. I was wondering if there might be an improvement in loading times in particular from the SD card if I bought the $130 T4 cable.
P.S. I did a test early on when I was new to Gig Performer. I copied my Gig files on to the SSD on the Surface Pro (Pro 4 at the time). I timed file loading from the SSD on the PC, and compared that to loading from the SD card on the powered hub. There was only a second or two difference, and I think the PC SSD was faster. I use the SD card because I have never like storing precious files on the PC itself.
Good advice as usual Erik:)
Well that is a nice context of your goal. But there is not going to be too much differece even using this cable. The bottle neck here is the speed of the card and the reader. Micro sds are generally slower than nvme drives. I would not spend that amount of money to try to improve the micro sd reader. There are more important thinks to do to improve the loading times.
For example, in windows is possible to use some amount of ram as storage. Let say you have less than one gb of gig files, you create and save a virtual partition for this task. And once that you configure GP To load files from the new location, it will greatly improve loading times.
Just google ram disk or similar apps for windows. Some are free but limiting the amount of virtual ram
2 downsides. The most obvious is you are reducing your available ram. The other one, as ram is volatile, you need to save the partitions to iso file everytime you modify and save the gig files. Because this iso that is loaded to the ram disk every reboot is a read only file, so needs to be overwritten when you do modifications.
I never tried this as my files are small but i hope it helps.
And i think there is a hack about starting GP with predicitive loading when multiple racks are cteated. Enabling few, improves loading times. But i haven’t tried this as well cause i don’t need it.
You need to find your needs and fine the best possible solution
Regards
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I do have some SSD space free. Can a ram disc take space from the SSD within the PC?
Technically, the ram amount that you set as virtual hdd, will be loaded only at boot to the physical ram, this means, you need to have the equivalent amount of ram available for saving the iso. But this iso can be stored in external storage, such as your micro sd. It just need it to load it once in the booting process of windows so no real performance issues if you have it on ssd or micro sd. Once that the files are copied to ram space, gig files will be loaded from there, improving a lot the reading and writing speeds.
I use ram disk for some cache storage for internet browser. On this way i avoid unnecessary writing to ssds and improve browser performance.
I dont know your currently loading times, but if you are confident, do the setup and let us know the results.
What I will do is copy the GP files to the SSD and compare loading times now that I have upgraded from a Surface Pro 4 to a SP 8.
As expected, there was only a 2 second difference between loading from the SD card and loading from the SSD within the PC. Although my SP 8 has TB 4 ports, I would probably need to upgrade my powered dock to TB 4 also in addition to buying the expensive Apple cable. And who knows what if any gains would be made for the $NZ1000 outlay?
No offense, but how long is your loading time? And how much do you thing a cable can improve your times?