The Apple Thunderbolt Display Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 23, 2011 2:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Displays
- Mac
- Apple
- Thunderbolt
- Thunderbolt Display
Dissection
If you haven't gathered by now, the Thunderbolt Display isn't a regular monitor - it has a lot of components inside that you'd typically only find in a full fledged computer. Being the curious cat I am, I wanted to see inside. Apple isn't too fond of us poking around inside their review samples, but luckily the Crabtree Valley Mall Apple Store just got Thunderbolt Displays in so I hopped in the practical-wagon and grabbed one in the name of science.
Apple has an incredible fascination with using magnets in its designs. What it enables are some pretty neat enclosures, particularly on its displays. The glass front of the Thunderbolt Display is actually identical to what's used on the 27-inch LED Cinema Display and iMac. The glass is held to the chassis via several very strong magnets. To remove the glass you'll need to use suction cups:
Behind the glass front is the actual LCD panel itself. The LCD and backlight are enclosed in a single unit. What we're interested in is behind the LCD however. Unplug a few cables and remove a grounding screw and the LCD unit is easily cast aside. Behind it are two discrete PCBs:
The PCB on the left is the monitor's power supply. Looking at another half-wave rectifier isn't on my to-do list this time, so we turn our attention to the right PCB. This is the board that handles all of the IO on the Thunderbolt Display. All of the screws we've removed thus far just need a T9/T10 torx bit.
The Thunderbolt Display's motherboard is full of controllers driving all of the rear facing IO ports. Contrary to what we originally posted, I now believe this is the same Light Ridge controller we've seen on other Macs (not the MacBook Air):
The external Thunderbolt cable actually continues inside the display and ends up at an internal Thunderbolt port. The cable terminates at the port and then is routed via traces on the PCB to the Eagle Ridge chip:
The other controllers are sprinkled around the PCB, although there's enough space between all of them to make routing nice and easy. The beauty of designing PCBs for monitors like this is you have tons of room to work with.
Pericom provides a PCIe x1 to 4-USB-port adapter on the board:
The internal speakers are driven by a combination of an ST-NXP 0161ET USB audio controller and an Analog Devices ADAV4601 audio processor. The ST-NXP controller sits on an internal USB interface, while the ADAV4601 dangles off of it.
That wraps it up for the front of the PCB. Around back there's a collection of stereo amps as well as the GigE (Broadcom BCM57761) and FW800 (LSI L-FW643E-2) controllers.
There's nothing immediately apparent in the PCB design that would point to the cause of the issue we saw with the Promise Pegasus interfering with the Thunderbolt Display's USB audio controller. The root cause must be exclusive to the Pegasus.
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doubledeej - Sunday, September 25, 2011 - link
I have many friends that work in "broadcast" and all but one of them lust after the Apple displays because they've got this silly notion that they are the best out there. No matter how many charts, spec sheets, reviews, etc., I throw at them, they refuse to believe that a Dell, Eizo, or anybody else could produce a monitor that performs better, especially if said monitor happens to be less expensive. There are an awful lot of Apple Kool-Aid drinkers out there, and nowhere is it worse than with video "professionals."seapeople - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
My new Dell XPS 17 has an antiglare screen. Moderate progress?Dennis Travis - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Excellent review Anand as always. You covered everything I was curious about and more. Thanks again!HHCosmin - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
want to say i just love your reviews Anand. i can tell you are passionate about what you do.this thing seems quite cool and it brings lots of help in cable clutter area. however i'm a pc guy and this is a mac. you talk about the future, and the possibilities. i've been thinking about this for some time now and getting really excited about the implications. i can see getting standard having monitors with thunderbolt and not much else to keep price down. link the display (through thunderbolt) cases that have sata ports and pciexpress ones. i call this a "slave box".
to have:
- laptop: slim, light, good autonomy (should be able to power this via display)
- display with thunderbolt, with ability to extend and not much extra
- a "slave-box" having psu, hdds, gpus and pciexpress slots for extras (no memory or cpu)
you get:
- use (and pay for) a single machine that you can carry around (with igp only)
- have practically no cable clutter
- get to feed power to the laptop through the monitor (when/if laptop maker standardize mobile bricks)
- have extra gpu/storage/sound etc when you are at home/office
- be able to upgrade the gpu
willmo - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Anand: I suspect that the Thunderbolt Display uses a Light Ridge controller, and the reason its DP output is not available for daisy-chaining is that it's used to drive the Thunderbolt Display's own panel.willmo - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Never mind, I hadn't gotten to the dissection yet. I assume the part number on the Thunderbolt controller checks out as Eagle Ridge...Ryan Smith - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
Anand and I actually went back and forth on this. It's our belief that the display is being fed by LVDS, processed by some hereto unidentified controller on the logic board. You can see the ZIF cable connector on the following image, it's the gold colored component near the top-right: http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/1405#38ermhmm - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
there is a product i'm not sure if its in production or whether you can use a GPU with it, but its similar to what you were talking about you can read about here. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Magma-Intros-PCI-Ex...as for gaming i'm in the UK and recently tried Onlive on my macbook and have to say i love the idea of cloud gaming solves the problem of expensive hardware for gaming.
efeman - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
One small thing to point out: it looks like the wrong table was used in the "Testing the PIeces" section: it's listed as power consumption instead of something along the lines of transfer rates.I picked up the 4GB/128GB 11" Air a few days ago ($300 off!) for campus use; it does everything I need it to do in a great form factor. I was originally looking at a 14" unit, maybe a Lenovo E420s or T420s, but I haven't looked back. I have a self-built gaming desktop at home, yet the idea of a Thunderbolt future really intrigues me. While I don't ever see myself buying something like this display, I'm hoping to see cheaper storage solutions, and my fingers are crossed for external graphics support, as that's the only thing I'm missing on a unit like this.
Excellent review, as usual. I don't know if a video review has been done before, but I enjoyed it. The main points of the article in an easily-digestible form for those times that I don't want to read through paragraphs. I hope we see them in every review :-)
Off-topic: In case this post gets any attention, is there any chance the Macbook Air review can be updated with internal temperature data? I was disappointed to only see the surface and exhaust temperature info.
eXces - Friday, September 23, 2011 - link
love your video review! keep on excellent work!