Some of Amazon’s customer reviews are slightly confusing: In our experience the ethernet port worked as expected, as did the USB-A port. (Of course, we’d have preferred a 10Gbps port, at least.) The slight lack of I/O flexibility knocks this down a notch. If you’re okay using the USB port for a mouse or keyboard, rather than for high-speed external storage, the GTD300 will suit you fine. Ports are minimal: one HDMI 2.0 port, one DisplayPort 1.2 port, one 5Gbps USB-A port, and gigabit ethernet port. On its underside, a green plastic shell conceals a nook to store the dock’s short, 5-inch cord when not in use. IOgear’s plastic dock measures just 2.2 x 0.91 x 4.06 inches, and is among the smallest we’ve tested, so it neatly fits into a backpack for travel. The Thunderbolt 3 dock is bus-powered, however, which means you’ll want your laptop to be plugged in for best results, though the hub itself doesn’t require its own charger. They’re usually bus-powered, meaning they’ll require an external charger for power and to power any connected phones.Īlthough it’s listed as a travel dock, the IOgear GTD300 serves as a very good regular work companion. We lead off with our picks for best budget docks, which typically boast a compact form factor and just two display outputs. The founder of dock maker Plugable explains this in more detail in our story. Why you can’t buy a Thunderbolt dock may be as much to do with the simple (in)availability of components as anything else.
If a dock goes out of stock, it may be pulled from our listings. We define the “best” Thunderbolt docks as much by availability as well as performance. (If you don’t have one, that’s fine-just buy a Thunderbolt dock instead.) The latter is useful if you’re among the small number of those who own dedicated Thunderbolt displays. We define a Thunderbolt hub as Thunderbolt-in, Thunderbolt-out. We define a Thunderbolt dock as one that supplies the ports you need for legacy devices, like USB-A and HDMI.
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If you want to learn more about the benefits of a Thunderbolt dock, what to look for when buying one, or how to know whether your laptop will support one, you can find that in our buying guide, too. The longer answer, explaining the differences, may be found within our Thunderbolt buying guide below our recommendations. What’s the difference between Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, and USB4? The simple answer is that they’re all extremely similar. The bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4 is enough to drive high-resolution displays and shuttle data back and forth between peripherals without causing your display to flicker or your video stream to stutter. Intel helped launch the updated Thunderbolt 4 specification in July 2020 as part of its 11th-gen “Tiger Lake” Core laptops, and the specification has become more popular on productivity laptops. If your laptop includes a Thunderbolt port, chances are it supports the Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 standard, both of which provide 40Gbps. (There’s nothing stopping you from using a USB-C hub with a Thunderbolt dock, either.) You can also use Thunderbolt 3 to enable an external GPU for your PC. While a USB-C hub can support a single 4K display, often at an eye-wearying 30Hz refresh rate, Thunderbolt docks can support up to two 4K displays at a comfortable 60Hz.
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That primarily matters where display connectivity is concerned, but can also affect the number and type of external hard drives, SSDs, and other peripherals that your PC can connect to. USB-C hubs or dongles are far cheaper, but they offer far less bandwidth. The biggest difference between Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs are price and bandwidth.
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