OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock review: Big, pricey, ambitious

Price When Reviewed

$349.99

Best Prices Today: OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock

OWC’s Thunderbolt Go Dock has a singular promoting level in its favor: the shortage of an exterior energy brick. This helps scale back cable muddle and, in concept, makes it simpler to take this Thunderbolt 4 dock on the go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fairly obtain its promise.

Like laptops, Thunderbolt docks can embody pretty sizeable energy bricks—usually weighing about as a lot because the dock itself. Yet desktop PCs and a few sport consoles handle to combine the facility transformer contained in the chassis itself, offering a cleaner, extra streamlined look.

Note: See our roundup of the best Thunderbolt docks to study competing merchandise, what to search for in a Thunderbolt dock, and shopping for suggestions.

OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock: Features

You could make the case that the OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock combines the very best of each worlds: All there may be within the field is the 28-inch Thunderbolt 4 cable, the facility cable, and the dock itself. If OWC included a small pouch that the gadgets might be saved in, you possibly can make the case that this can be a journey dock. Regardless, the shortage of further cabling is a promoting level in its favor.

OWC has historically served the Mac market, which has used Thunderbolt as a direct show interface as a lot as an I/O growth cable. In addition to a single HDMI 2.1 port, the Dock Go gives two downstream Thunderbolt 4 ports, in addition to the Thunderbolt 4 connection to the host PC. Those further downstream ports can be utilized as show connections, although you’ll have to pay a further $20 or so for a Thunderbolt 4-to-USB-C cable or an analogous DisplayPort cable. In truth, we used such a cable to drive a second 4K show at 60Hz, verifying that the Dock Go’s bandwidth works as marketed.

Mark Hachman / IDG

It’s value noting that the one HDMI 2.1 port is de facto uncommon—the huge bandwidth it gives technically permits for a single 10Okay show at 120Hz, which is actually past at this time’s obtainable {hardware}.

Additional ports embody a legacy 5Gb/s USB-A port, a 10Gb/s USB-C port, an audio jack, and an SD 4.0 UHS-II card slot on the entrance; on the again, the dock consists of the 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, the HDMI port, a 2.5Gb/s ethernet port, and a pair of 10Gb/s USB-A ports. The dock delivers 90W of charging energy downstream by way of the Thunderbolt 4 cable, which snakes out from the aspect of the dock.

In my expertise, the USB-A ports on the rear of the dock accommodated a number of random USB keys and different units, however they’re carefully spaced. If you may have an oddly formed promotional dongle, for instance, it might not match. You can use the front-facing port as a substitute.

Despite its “Thunderbolt Dock Go” identify, OWC’s dock isn’t small; at 9.5 inches lengthy and 3.6 inches deep, it’s bigger than you may anticipate. It additionally weighs 2.09 kilos, which is a few pound lower than a typical laptop computer weighs. The aluminum chassis does a terrific job of dissipating warmth, in order that the dock by no means heated up past a barely heat temperature in my exams.

Mark Hachman / IDG

OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock: Performance

Although OWC doesn’t listing smartphone charging as a promoting level, the dock actually does generate sufficient energy to fast-charge a smartphone: 9.5W from the front-facing USB-C port, and about 12W in case you use one of many rear Thunderbolt ports for a similar function. Otherwise, the USB-A ports produce about 2.5W, simply sufficient to cost a smartphone over a number of hours.

OWC’s Thunderbolt Go Dock linked to 2 4K shows completely; identical for a single 4K show and a 1440p widescreen show at 100Hz. OWC’s Thunderbolt Go Dock initially handed our streaming efficiency exams with flying colours, streaming our 4K60 check video over its built-in ethernet with out dropping any frames.

In half, that’s as a result of YouTube streamed the video at a decrease bitrate than we anticipated. The motive for that grew to become obvious: Though the dock’s ethernet port lit up appropriately, all the knowledge was being handed by way of Wi-Fi, even with the ethernet cable inserted. OWC assist referred us to a Realtek Ethernet software program driver, however even after putting in it, rebooting, disconnecting the dock, and operating a diagnostic program, ethernet nonetheless didn’t work appropriately. Inexplicably, it did work a reboot or two later. After doing so, the dock allowed reads and writes at anticipated speeds on our SSD whereas streaming video.

Should you purchase the OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock?

The OWC Thunderbolt Dock Go might be a bit too huge and heavy to tote alongside on a enterprise journey, nevertheless it is doable. It seems that you simply’ll want to put in a software program driver to allow ethernet, nonetheless, if and when that driver ultimately works. And at a $349 MSRP, you’ll pay for the privilege. We actually respect what OWC got down to do right here with the Thunderbolt Dock Go, however its dimension, value, and driver concern imply that it falls a bit wanting an Editor’s Choice award.