Why have a crippled JHL6240 Thunderbolt 3 port in the GL502VM?

[link626]

The skylake and kabylake GL502VM have the JHL6240 thunderbolt controller.

the 6240 is a crippled half speed version, having 20gbps or lower bandwidth. pcie 3.0 x 2 lanes.

The 6340 thunderbolt controller has the full 40gbps bandwidth. pcie 3.0 x 4 lanes.

So our GL502VM is gimped, and putting a beefy graphics card in an eGPU box would result in a big performance penalty running at pcie 3.0 x2.
A GTX1080 in the XG Station will only be a slight improvement, and a super high cost.
Anything less than a gtx1080 egpu would probably have worse performance than the built-in gtx1060 of this laptop.


Thunderbolt sounds useless on the 502VM.

[link626]

anyone with a GL702 check the controller version?

is it also 15bf ?

I see asus isn't the only one using this gimp controller. Lenovo uses 15BF too for the Thinkpad

[ImDez]

I confirm GL702vm does also have JHL6240. Isn't it a scam from ASUS? How can they mark this laptop in XG station 2 comptability list?

[andvoy]

Yeah it's frustrating as hell. I have the 502VM with the XG Station 2, but after finding out that it's the JHL6420 controller, I gave up on buying a video card for it, for now.
I even contacted the Asus support center about replacing the controller and I got informed that that is not an option... and I think that's the least they could do, cause I think they are getting a lot of bad rep from this situation.
The splash page for the laptop has fine print about different SKUs having different controllers, but I've yet to see a 502/702VM with a proper TB3 controller.

[U2Desire]

The sad thing is that the price difference is literally only a few bucks between the LP and SP controllers.