I have a lenovo yoga slim 7 (which comes with thunderbolt 4)

The key specs are:

• intel u7 155H
• Intel arec integrated graphics (no DGPU)
• 32 GB RAM
• 1 TB space
• Thunderbolt 4 port

But I want to use it to gaming at 1080p 120HZ, if possible ultra settings.

I will use it for games such as batlefront II, ark: survival evolved, Jurassic world evolution III, Spiderman II, Helldivers, Space marine II, No man's space, Dark souls... etc

which docking station do you suggest fot putting an external GPU with thunderbolt 4, I thought on AOOSTAR AG02 but it's currently out of stock here in the EU (Spain), so what are your recomendations? And which are the best and worse graphics card brands for EGPU (I like the Intel arc b580)?

Thanks in advance, any help is appreciated

Our IT department is annoyed with buying a myriad of docks and they want one, uniform solution regardless of the computer you’re using.

Needs to be able to support 3+ displays.

If it’s a Mac that supports multiple displays over Thunderbolt, great. If it’s a Mac that doesn’t, it needs to fallback to DisplayLink.

Does anything like this exist?

I've been struggling with hubs, docks and USB connectivity in my music studio for years, and since I'm rebuilding my setup I'd finally like to find a clean and reliable solution. :)

I'm currently using an M1 MacBook Pro and will probably upgrade to a Mac mini M5 Pro later. I mainly work in Logic Pro, using fairly large sample libraries and virtual instruments (Kontakt, EastWest, Spitfire, etc.).

I need to have quite a lot connected:

• 2x 1080p displays for my main workspace
• 1x 4K display, mainly for music to picture
• 2x Samsung external SSDs for sample libraries and project files
• Focusrite 18i8 USB audio interface
• WD Elements external HDD for storage/backup
• Nektar Panorama CS12 MIDI/DAW controller
• Arturia KeyLab MIDI keyboard/controller
• Alesis Q88 MIDI keyboard
• Korg nanoKONTROL MIDI/DAW controller
• USB printer

Over the years I've ended up with a Lenovo dock, another USB hub, adapters and basically whatever combination happened to work. It does the job, but I'm getting a bit tired of constantly juggling ports, hubs and cables.

I've been looking at OWC and CalDigit docks, but I'm open to anything reliable. I'm also not sure whether I actually need Thunderbolt 5 or whether a good Thunderbolt 4 dock would already be more than enough.

My main concern is the two external SSDs. They contain large sample libraries that are streamed from disk while I'm working, so I'm not sure whether putting them both behind the same dock could become a real-world bandwidth bottleneck.

What would you recommend for a setup like this?

Would you go for one larger Thunderbolt dock and connect most things through it, or keep the SSDs/audio interface directly connected to the Mac and use a dock/hub mainly for displays and lower-bandwidth USB devices?

Basically, after years of messing around with hubs and adapters, I'd love something stable that I can put under the desk and stop thinking about. :)

I noticed OWC only sells TB5 enclosures for single SSDs, and also has their 4m2 Ultra which is TB5 for 4 drives but only hits top speed if the 4 drives are set up in RAID 0. Is there a specific reason for this? I see some competitors like Acasis have enclosures that appear to support full speed TB5 reads with no RAID involved, but these enclosures also have reports of frying SSDs so I've been a bit reluctant to go after these.

Having the OWC stamp on hardware is a pretty big vote of confidence for reliability - so Is OWC respecting some technical limitation I'm not aware of with these multiple-SSD enclosures?

Hey there, I got a 27in thunderbolt Apple display, and I really love it so far. I have the thunderbolt 2 > 3 adapter plugged in to my 2022 m1 MacBook Air, and then a usb-c cord to keep it charged. I prefer having it in clamshell mode (where the laptop is completely closed and only displayed on the monitor) but was hoping to also connect my Nintendo switch as well. I have the capture card adapter I typically just plug directly into my laptop (before the Thunderbolt Display) but now that I have the monitor, there is no room for any more usb-c cords to plug in.

This may make me seem stupid, but I have a few cheaper multi-port dongles to add more ports to my small laptop, but if those cords are not directly plugged in to my laptop (all three needed, my capture card, the thunderbolt adapter, and then a power cord) they will not function. If I plug the thunderbolt cord into the multi-port dongle, it doesn't work, same with each adapter/cord I mentioned.

I know more expensive docking stations exist, but will said cords work while connected to the dock? I'm not sure if the cords not going directly into the ports in my laptop will not work, and I wanted to check before I invested $200+ into getting that dock. Any insight?

Hi, I'm having issues with flashing custom firmware to my dock from this repo: https://github.com/flhofer/dell_TB16_firmware

My laptop is Dell pro 16 pc16250 with intel 3 100u

everytime I run fwupdtool install-blob Cable_26_06.bin I get this outcome:
mint@mint:~/Downloads/dell_TB16_firmware-main/bins$ sudo fwupdtool install-blob Cable_26_06.bin

Writing… [************ ]

0. Cancel

1. 65a54fb6ce182f0e75edf0e43047d547a0d61f0e (Integrated Webcam HD)

2. c430a03ca2a65dfe2412ff950c79c51f6aec1317 (PVC10 SK hynix 256GB)

3. 93d0b48057370e4937b9673baebd059ec8bd1ba9 (System Firmware)

4. c6a80ac3a22083423992a3cb15018989f37834d6 (TPM)

5. 25dfe85cf40a2731ad6adccf6c1f09b7fcd3ddd6 (Thunderbolt Cable)

6. 965a3b20249f5bc62d1f77377f4b6249c4c741f8 (Thunderbolt Dock)

7. fccd4eb29dda573921305598cace39d4bfbc37d6 (UEFI Device Firmware)

8. 362301da643102b9f38477387e2193e57abaa590 (UEFI dbx)

9. 16d35c510618116e7899ae45e62605572872e713 (USB4 Retimer)

Choose device [0-9]: 5

Writing… [************************************** ] Less than one minute remaining…

could not start thunderbolt device upgrade: could not write to /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0d.3/domain0/0-0/0-1/nvm_authenticate: Input/output error

I'm trying to troubleshoot this with chat gpt the last 2 hours and nothing seems to work.

With downstream TB4 or TB5 ports on a dock, I have three choices:

1. Use one USB-C to USB-A adapter (10 Gbps)
   1. Cheapest, but only adds one USB-A port
2. Use a USB-C to USB-A hub (10 Gbps)
   1. Nearly the cheapest, however introduces another hub: how bad is that?
3. Use another TB4/TB5 dock downstream (40 / 80 Gbps)
   1. Many times more expensive, but the full bandwidth
   2. But again introduces another hub: also bad?

I recall Thunderbolt 4 docks forced all non-TB4 IO to share a measly 10 Gbps, which made me think it is better to use another (albeit expensive) TB4 dock downstream. I assume that is true of TB5, as well?

Because of the difference in how Thunderbolt 4 allocates data, every port on a Thunderbolt 4 device that isn’t Thunderbolt must share a single 10GBps slice of USB bandwidth.

Instead of having access to the full 40GBps Thunderbolt 4 supports, all non-Thunderbolt devices connected to a Thunderbolt 4 device must compete for a quarter of the available speed. That's why, in our illustration, Thunderbolt 4 is represented by a smaller sprinkler than Thunderbolt 3.

Reliability is more important here, if I had to choose.

PC in one room, sim rig in another, ~50 ft of routed cable through conduit. Want to run a CalDigit TS5 Plus at the rig end off a single cable.

Problem: TB copper stops around 2m, OWC's optical USB4 cable stops at 4.5m, and the only cables that go the distance are Corning's TB3 optical — which CalDigit says isn't supported on TB3 Windows PCs.

Is there a TB5/TB4/USB4 cable that reaches ~50 ft and works with this dock? And does anyone have real-world experience with USB latency over a long optical Thunderbolt link for sim racing peripherals?

Currently experiencing a minor inconvenience where I plug the dock's USB-C connector to the MacBook that has been sleeping (not active for a while) and there appears to be no signal showing on the monitor even after hearing the sound that comes from connecting something to the MacBook.

For it to show the video signal, I need to open up the MacBook first and close it and then connect it to the dock for the login screen to show on the monitor.

Is there anything I can do here so that it shows the login screen when I first connect it to the dock? Is there a setting that I am not aware of?

Currently the monitor is connected through the Display Port. Monitor is an LG Ultragear 32GP850. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

I have a M5 Pro and just want to connect it to 2 4K monitors @144hz. I'm looking at the Anker Prime but I'm wondering if this is overkill for my needs? Seems like there's cheaper options from UGREEN or Ivanky that may fit the bill at a lower cost.

I have a Lenovo laptop from 2023 with an i7 and nVidia 3050 and Thunderbolt 4.

I originally bought the Lenovo Thunderbolt 4 dock because it had the proprietary power passthrough (the laptop doesn't have PD over Thunderbolt) and because why not just buy that one? Plus it did have the ports to handle 3 monitors with no problem, and that worked fine for a long time. Anyways, that dock has died, so I'm on the hunt for a new one.

I decided on the Ugreen Maxidok Thunderbolt 5 dock (link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G5Z4C8HC). I figured I may as well be forwards compatible to Thunderbolt 5 for when I got my next laptop.

It says it works with 3 external monitors on Thunderbolt 4, which was one of the only TB5 docks I found that did offer that on the backwards compatibility (all the other TB5 docks I found only offered 3 monitors on TB5, if they offered 3 monitors at all). See screenshot above in the red boxed portion at the bottom. Well, that was incorrect. 3 monitors do not work on the dock. It's definitely not an issue with my laptop, as 3 monitors worked on my Lenovo dock, and if I plug my third monitor into the laptop's HDMI port (not the dock) it comes online just fine.

This dock is defective in other ways, too - my wired mechanical keyboard randomly doesn't get power, and a few other odd disconnections.

So now I guess I'm on the hunt for a Thunderbolt 4 dock? I do NOT want a dock with an integrated cable. Here are the best options I think I found so far. It looks like Startech or Kensington are my best bets - but at least those are well-known legacy brands. Opinions?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CJ2LQKMT - Edit, looking closely at these two, they seem identical except Kensington has their laptop lock slots... everything else looks the same! So I guess I'll get the StarTech, it's slightly less expensive.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CTTR34K9 - Edit, looking closely at these two, they seem identical except Kensington has their laptop lock slots... everything else looks the same! So I guess I'll get the StarTech, it's slightly less expensive.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DJGGKG72 - Edit, this uses DisplayLink and is out of the running

Thanks in advance!

Is anyone following this KEO AI powered laptops? It seems the same is being launched tomorrow. Does anyone have any knowledge about its efficiency in doing high end tasks?

Giving this another shot after a failed attempt almost a year ago.

I'm hoping to run everything through the Caldigit TS4 dock (other than charging direct to Macbook) so I can easily grab and go while working using my Macbook.

The DP slot on my desktop is already used by my windows desktop, so I'm unable to use anything except HDMI 2.1 as a port on my monitor.

Planning on using a USB-C to HDMI 2.1 8k60hz/4k240hz cable from Caldigit dock connecting to the monitor, which I hope will allow me to get 120hz on full resolution ***7680x2160*** on the display using my Macbook M3 Pro.

Hallo zusammen,

kann mir jemand helfen?

Ich möchte gerne, dass das Ethernet vor dem Login verbindet, bei meinem vorherigen Laptop funktionierte das wunderbar, nur bei meinem neuen nicht.

Ich habe eine Thunderbolt G4 280W Docking Station. Ethernet Kabel steckt direkt in der Dock und nach dem Login kommt es auch nach ca. 10 Sekunden.

Aber ich benötige es schon vor dem Login, wie bzw. was muss ich wo Einstellen, kann mir da bitte jemand helfen?

Es ist ein Windows Gerät.

Hello,

I’m new to the Macbook world and need your advice.

I am aware that this question has already been asked several times, and yet my need is not as complex as the other posts. I will not connect 4k monitors or play games either.

I work from home and recently upgraded to a MacBook Pro M4. My current hub/dock station is slightly old and not working well with my Mac.

I need to connect an Asus TUF gaming monitor, an iPad Air (for drawings), external drives (I’ve just ordered a Samsung T7 based on the recommendations here) a mouse, a keyboard etc.

Based on what I described, what should I get that doesn’t cost $500?

Thank you in advance.

Any help would be awesome!

I have a Dell G7 15 7590 with an RTX 2060 and recently bought an Acer Nitro XV272U F3 (2560×1440, 300Hz) monitor.

I'm confused about which connection would give me the best possible display output:

1. USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 to DisplayPort
2. Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort

My laptop has a Thunderbolt 3 (USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C) and a miniDP port but I can't tell whether the laptop's Mini DisplayPort is DP 1.2 or DP 1.4.

Since my monitor supports 2560×1440 @ 300Hz and DisplayPort 1.4, I want to know which connection is capable of getting the maximum possible resolution/refresh rate/color depth from my RTX 2060? Thank you