Gaming: Breaking Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Review
A capable Thunderbolt 5 dock that offers blisteringly fast ports and high power delivery for attached devices. An added NVMe port is a clever addition for easy file transfers between devices, too. But the price, competition, and fan noise work against it.
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Thunderbolt 5 is a powerful interface. It's also an expensive one. Available only on the latest devices, and with limited availability today, it took me a while for one to land on my lap. When one did, with the Alienware 15 Area-51, I began my search for a hub that might let me take advantage of its high-speed capabilities. As I discovered, a Thunderbolt 5 hub runs anywhere from expensive to 'good lord, they can't be serious, can they?'
The Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma I'm looking at today is more the latter at $400/£400. But do cheaper Thunderbolt 5 hubs come with RGB lighting? They do not—at least most I've seen.
The Thunderbolt 5 Dock offers a range of ports to those willing to drop that sort of moolah on the thing: 3x Thunderbolt 5 (downstream), 1x Thunderbolt 5 (upstream; for the connection to your PC, with 140 W power delivery), 1 Gb ethernet, 2x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen2, 1x USB Type-C 3.2 Gen2, an SD card slot, and a microphone/headphone combo port.
Thunderbolt 5 supports PCIe 4.0, DisplayPort 2.1 and USB4 standards for a properly universal dock over a few of those connections. It's also a pretty slim device for all its features; at 207 x 85 x 31 mm. The 250 W power brick provided, however, is huge. More or less a match for the Dock itself—seriously.
Ports: 1x Thunderbolt 5 (Upstream), 3x Thunderbolt 5 (80 Gbps), 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), 1x M.2 2280 Slot (PCIe 4x4), 1x Gigabit Ethernet, 1x SD Card Reader (UHS-II), 1x 3.5mm AudioCooling: ActiveExtra features: RGB lightingCable: 0.8 m braided TB5Price: $400/£400
The Thunderbolt 5 ports are rated to 80 Gbps for data as a baseline. Though it can boost to the maximum available bandwidth of 120 Gbps if you're using it for display/video. I've read up on this feature, called Bandwidth Boost, and it basically redistributes the available bandwidth based on demand. So, if you think of the overall bandwidth both ways along a Thunderbolt 5 connection as 160 Gbps, by default, a Thunderbolt 5 connection operates at 80 Gbps both
Source: PC Gamer
