Thunderbolt 5 guarantees an 80Gbps link and 64Gbps of PCIe through certification; USB4 only has to clear 20Gbps to meet spec. The headline 120Gbps is four lanes redistributed 3:1, not a faster pipe.
CL counts clock cycles, not time. One division — (CL x 2000) / data rate — separates DDR5-4800 CL40 at 16.7 ns from DDR5-8000 CL38 at 9.5 ns, and explains why bigger numbers can be slower.
The 1ms on a spec sheet is almost always GtG, but what you actually see is governed by MPRT. At 240Hz, motion blur measures about 4.2 pixels. Here is the math behind both numbers.
The X prefix on a Core Ultra laptop chip refers to graphics, not cores. Every Core Ultra Series 3 part shares the same 25W base TDP — and the number that actually decides sustained performance appears nowhere in the name.
A PCIe 5.0 SSD reads sequentially at 14,800MB/s, roughly double a Gen4 drive. Measured game load times differ by under 0.2 seconds. Here is the bandwidth, heat and endurance math that explains the gap between the two facts.
DisplayHDR 400 does not require local dimming at all. Run the VESA certification numbers tier by tier and the real dividing line between 400, 600 and 1000 is not peak brightness — it is the black level.
PSU wattage comes from adding GPU TGP to CPU peak power, then dividing by a target load ratio. Here is the math for an RTX 5090 plus Core Ultra 9 285K — a 905W real load — and what rated wattage should carry it.
Contrast ratio splits four panel types apart: 1,000:1 for TN, 3,000:1 for VA, effectively infinite for OLED. Converting those numbers into black-level brightness and frame time shows where the spec sheet actually changes the picture.
A USB4 logo does not guarantee 40Gbps — the specification's floor is 20Gbps. Thunderbolt 4 mandates 40Gbps and Thunderbolt 5 mandates 80Gbps. Here is what actually differs behind the identical USB-C port.
The dividing line across the three generations is the 6GHz band. Wi-Fi 6 uses 2.4/5GHz, 6E adds 6GHz, and 7 layers on 320MHz, 4K-QAM and MLO for a theoretical 46Gbps. Here is where the speed actually comes from.