Connectivity has always been a major issue in technology, and perhaps now it’s a bigger deal than ever for consumers. I had the opportunity to review a tech gadget in the Thunderbolt 3 Dock and have my experience below.
The Problem Of Ports:
Newer laptops and tablets continue to perform better and better, get lighter and lighter and cost less and less. But unfortunately for some of us, one corner they seem to almost always cut is that of the amount of ports they build into the unit.
Other World Computing has come up with a brilliant device that solves close to 100% of these problems. The brand-new Thunderbolt 3 Dock is the latest offering from this company which continues to offer us great connectivity expansion solutions. This little baby delivers more connectivity, more power and more charging capability than ever before, and truly allows all connected devices to perform at their maximum.
Checking It Out:
We were lucky enough to get an advance unit while people were still pre-ordering and put it through its paces here in the office.
This unit sports an amazing 13 ports, including dual Thunderbolt 3s, five discrete USB 3.1 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, an SD card reader, a legacy Firewire 800 port just in case you ever need to connect a legacy device, and dual audio ins and outs. We decided to give it the acid test and see at what point it would overload or glitch.
After over an hour doing everything we could to get it to hiccup, we are happy to report that the unit is rock solid. Jitter and latency were as low as possibly could be expected, and at one point we did manage throughputs very close to the bus’s 40gb/s limit. No problem. This thing is truly a tank. You will never have to worry about performance issues with one of these.
In fact, because you have a whole whopping 40gb/s to play with, you can use this unit to run multiple displays, mixing and matching HD with the newer 4k and even the state of the art 5k displays. No further adaptors required! And for those of you working in the audio industry, there is full S/PDIF support included, in combination with the firewire 800. We fired up Logic using an old firewire 800 interface, smooth sailing all the way.
These puppies are available in sexy Space Gray or in a more snazzy Silver if you prefer. At $299.99 they are not cheap, but when you consider what they do and how well they do it we consider them to be an excellent bargain.
Other World Computing has been around since 1989, and is also proud of it’s distinction as one of the leading zero emissions Mac and PC technology companies in the region. They take their responsibility to the rest of us and the environment seriously as a company.
The Thunderbolt 3 Dock was provided for review purposes. All opinions expressed are our own.