Thanks for the detailed video! Can you please make a test for SMB Multichannel setup as well? So you connect the dock to a 10G NIC on your network and another 10G NIC connected to the Sabrent TB3 10G which is also connected to the Dock TB port? So in this case you only use 1 TB port on the MAC, for 2x10GB connections. I had great results with SMB multichannel towards a Synology NAS with 2 10G NICs as I can push data back and forth with 2.4 Gbyte/s between the MAC and the NAS :)

How can you tell if someone uses arch? They'll tell you. We use dell u2423e (or something similar) at work, they do type-c docking as well as displayport out with DSC, allowing for a single cable solution for USB, dual displays and GbE

@charlesturner897 i wish we could pish for type c docks. The majority of the local machines are Lenovo thinkpads from 2019, and dell vostros from 2021. The newest wave we have are Lenovo E15 Gen2s (of course i had to give me the newest one :D ). So really, the only way we can have everything the sameis go Type-A 3.0. Sad really, imagine how much less cabling there would be. I even went to the extent of cable tieing my dock to the monitor arm because it got in the way. My ethernet and dock power just run up the pole.

It's a common thing with docks. If you want to use 3 displays on a dock with a HP laptop you have to go into the bios and enable a high resolution mode setting. You'll otherwise get 1080p on two monitors and 480p on the 3rd. That's due to maxing out USB bandwidth. The setting lowers USB ports to 2.0 and the NIC to 100m

Llkķķkƙķloķjjk.ĵ​@@jamesmcjamesington631

I was looking at a 49" ultrawide, 5120x1440p60, but if you want USB 3.0 and 1GbE you'll have to drop it to 30Hz

I work in IT and it's what we supply and have done for years. Dell make excellent docks!

I recon the headphone jack is just a USB one anyways, just get one for $10 or so. still though sucks that they didn't at least move it to the back or something. that would be quite useful for PC speakers

It might be handy to get rid of some bandwidth requirements, the 3.5mm always uses some bandwidth sadly.

Hopefully they bring it back. I actually use split wired speakers and headset at the desk.

I have that exact same Dock, it's great.

I have WD19TBS I want to upgrade to a WD22TB4 via a module but I've seen any on Ebay :(

It'll work with both as long as the PC supports thunderbolt. If you want to use both monitors on both Mac and PC, just make sure you connect them as shown in this video - one into the dock's video outputs, the other into one of the Thunderbolt passthrough ports.

Daisy chaining requires the connected machine to support DisplayPort MST which Macs don't support. This is the same reason I can't just use the multiple display outputs on the dock itself.

Those adapters will only work for USB-C ports that support DP Alt Mode which none of the regular USB-C ports on the Caldigit dock support - they're purely USB data ports. This is an annoying thing with USB-C where it's no longer "universal" and different ports can support a varying range of features. The only other option would be USB to DP adapters that use "DisplayLink" which work on standard USB ports but are software driven and require drivers to be installed on the host machine, they also add a fair bit of CPU load and give a somewhat "compressed" looking image so while they can be useful in certain situations where you need more monitors than a machine can natively support, they aren't a replacement for a proper DP output.

(As you said not 10 seconds further into the video, hah.)

I forgot to put that in the video but testing using iPerf with the NIC connected directly to the laptop could easily get 10Gbps in both directiions.

Update - I had to re-install Mac OS Ventura, hook up the Sabrent NIC (it worked no issue). Then in-place upgrade to Sonoma, this kept what ever driver the system needed to keep the NIC functioning.

They're actually VESA monitor arms that allow the VESA plate to tilt to a full 90° angle. I then bolted a piece of MDF to each of them to hold the speakers - they work really well!

M1/M2/M3 non-Pro/Max only supports one external display, M1/M2/M3 Pro supports two external displays, M1/M2/M3 Max support three external displays in extended configuration. All Intel Macs support as much external display as the internal graphics e.g. Iris Xe supports. Apple found a weird way of monetizing external display capabilities pushing you to a upsell.

Which model of Caldigit dock are you using? Looks like their "Mini" ones have a pair of video outputs at the expense of a Thunderbolt passthrough port - internally they are likely using the second Thunderbolt port on the Thunderbolt IC as a second video output.

@@camerongray1515 Ahh, bought it in Jan 2020, it's the ‎USBCProDock-US07-SG

I suspect it's largely just a case of corporate IT departments replacing hardware as part of a regular 3/5 year rotation - once a device hits a certain age/the warranty runs out, they'll replace it as a matter of course. All the old equipment is sent off to recycling companies that generally refurbish and sell the equipment on. Generally does seem pretty wasteful but for these large companies, they'd often rather only run equipment that is fully supported by the manufacturer rather than needing to handle troubleshooting/repairs internally. It also means that home users/smaller businesses can get great deals on refurbished kit! Another reason can be companies either closing/restructuring offices. Towards the end of the pandemic, eBay was flooded with these docks - presumably either from companies closing offices with people now working from home, or from WFH employees who had previously been given docks by their employer for their home setups moving back into offices and no longer requiring them.

I'm using an M1 Max 16" Macbook Pro. As far as I'm aware, the non-Pro/Max models only support a single external display so you'd need to get a Pro/Max based machine.

@@camerongray1515 thanks

It's a wooden tabletop

Okay, thanks for clearing that one up! And thanks also for the great content, I really appreciate your work 😀@@camerongray1515

Knew I'd forget something: dancharblog.wordpress.com/2022/10/24/dell-wd22tb4-dock-review-and-teardown/

I definitely want to play around with using regular PCIe cards over Thunderbolt (and actually have a spare NVMe enclosure and M.2 to PCIe card) but for this I wanted a durable solution that could sit on my desk without risk of damage. To use a PCIe card I'd need to worry about some sort of external PSU and enclosure. Personally I don't really have any interest in using Airplay so it's not a big deal.

@@camerongray1515 if the pcie card is low power enough you can power it directly off the thunderbolt bus. That’s what I’m doing with my setup.

No idea about the 10gbit ethernet but I use the WD22 with linux and it works great with two 4K displays. Dell even let you upgrade the dock's firmware from linux (but only Ubuntu - a liveusb does the job though if you're using another distro).

Sounds okay to me, although I don't have a particularly deep voice and I'm recording with a headworn mic (Sennheiser HSP Essential) rather than a large desktop microphone so I'm never going to get that rich "UKpostsr voice" sound and unlike something like a lavalier mic, it picks up less bass/chest rumble and ends up being a bit more sibilant which, while not sounding as "warm" does tend to improve overall intelligibility. In terms of post-processing, I do apply a compressor, a slight boost to the higher frequencies and roll off anything below 120Hz (along with cutting out a few other "problem" frequencies) but I'm not some sort of audio expert so I've just focussed on making it sound as clear as possible rather than sounding particularly dramatic or cinematic.

I'm not, this is purely to allow me to access my NAS at 10gbps, my current internet connection is ~300mbps, hopefully upgrading to 1gbps in the near future once it's available.

Daisy chaining requires the connected machine to support DisplayPort MST which Macs don't support. This is the same reason I can't just use the multiple display outputs on the dock itself.

Yes, I did by an "inferior" product for less money, because that's a fairly normal thing to do when you don't need the capabilities of the more expensive one. We're talking a saving of £130 here and I don't need any of the additional features you mentioned. The Dell dock has one 10Gb/s USB-C port and I don't even really need that. The only 10Gb USB device I use is the SSDs from my camera (which I generally just plug into the laptop directly) so I'm only going to ever connect, at most, one 10Gb/s USB device at a time. I'm never going to need any other high speed USB devices since I rely on network storage rather than any sort of USB storage arrays - the only USB devices I currently have connected to my dock are a keyboard and a USB 2.0 audio interface. I also don't use CFexpress and I record most of my video to USB SSDs, and on the rare occasion that I do use an SD card, my laptop has a perfectly good UHS-II SD card reader in it, it's not something I need in a dock. I'd rather have camera media connected directly to the laptop anyway since it means I can easily undock and move the laptop without having to close my editing projects. Finally, my setup here allows me to easily use just the network adapter elsewhere with a laptop without having to disconnect and move an entire docking station complete with its power adapter.

That's definitely an option and I do want to try out PCIe enclosures in the future, but for this setup, the Sabrent NIC worked out a lot cheaper. I suspect you'd still need some sort of dock with the setup you'd mentioned as while the OWC device would handle network and display outputs, you'd need something else to handle the USB side of things (unless you could use one of those USB and HDMI laptop "dongles" off of the Thunderbolt passthrough port to connect both a second display and USB devices, although no idea if that would work).

you only have 1 thunderbolt port? that's what i was confused with. you could put a Sonnettech mcfiver pcie card, and get 10gbe, usb and two pnvme drives. i got one in a jonsbo n3, baller 11900k 8 bay nas with thunderbolt 4. i put it, where the gpu, could of gone. @@camerongray1515

I have multiple Thunderbolt ports but the point of this setup is to be able to dock everything over a single cable to make it super simple to connect/disconnect my laptop to move between working at my desk vs elsewhere and to easily swap between my work and personal laptops. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered with the new Dell dock and instead continued using the Caldigit and connected the NIC directly to the laptop. That Sonnet card looks really interesting and I'd be interested in trying one out in the future, but compared to this setup, you'd end up spending £400 for the card and £250 for the OWC enclosure to achieve basically the same setup that I have here that only cost me £220 with the exception of the M.2 slots on the Macfiver card, although that's not something I'd really have a use for.

All good!@@camerongray1515

i bought the dell from your link, was $208 but brand new. @@camerongray1515

I wouldn't say Thunderbolt is complicated or proprietary - it's been around for years and is extremely widely available on both PCs and Macs. Sure, you maybe won't get it on a low end laptop, but most higher end laptops have at least one TB port. USB 4 also offers backwards compatibility with Thunderbolt devices, but in true USB fashion it's a mess where computers can decide which Thunderbolt features they want to optionally support. At least when you're buying a machine that explicitly states Thunderbolt support, you know it'll work! While I only demonstrated the Mac in this video, this setup also works perfectly with my Windows/Linux based Framework laptop and I've used these docks extensively in a hybrid Mac/Windows environment. Not sure what you mean by "easily do without and be better off" - sure, I could do without this, but I wouldn't call plugging a series of different adapters and cables into both sides of my laptop vs using a single cable "better off." Not sure what you mean by USB 5, it's not even been named yet, let alone are any technical specs released. Sure there will always be a newer standard around the corner, but I prefer to buy technology whenever I need it, not constantly wait around for the "next thing"

@@camerongray1515 I'd agree it is a mess but if this works for you great - things always take 2x as long as projected but usb5 will get here and we should see much more capabilities and probably less proprietary nature of high bw ports, more interoperability. i am too cheap to go with apple walled garden and would rather build hackintosh with 2x perf for less money but the new unified mem on some of their new chips is pretty good for LLM - they are ahead of everybody with this aspect

DisplayPort daisy chaining also uses DisplayPort Multi Stream which Macs don't support. Same thing as connecting multiple monitors to the display outputs on the Dell dock as explained in the video.

@@RaduTek so the second monitor has to use the Thunderbolt port on the dock. Why not just connect the 10GB Ethernet into the second Thunderbolt controller on the Mac and it does not need to share bandwidth with the monitors.

@@granttaylor8179 Convenience and overall cleanliness of the setup. They wanted a one port solution so they came up with one. Maybe the other dock's being used somewhere else now.

@@granttaylor8179defeats 'one cable'-ness of a setup

As others have said, DisplayPort daisy chaining requires MST which Macs don't support. While Macs can work with daisy chained Thunderbolt displays, it would have cost a tonne to replace both of my monitors to go down that route. And yeah, I want to maintain the convenience of being able to dock everything over a single cable, but sure, if you absolutely need complete unconstrained network bandwidth, then you could always connect the NIC directly to the laptop.

Of course I'm well aware that I could have used the second TB port, but the whole point was that I wanted to be able to dock and swap machines using a single cable. As for the dock - these docks are available in both USB-C and Thunderbolt versions. The "main part" of the dock is the same on both but they have different I/O modules on the left hand side which handle the Thunderbolt/USB-C interface side of things. On this Thunderbolt version, there is a Thunderbolt controller which handles the two passthrough ports and then provides a DP interface which is passed to the video outputs via a MST hub and a USB 10gbps connection which is sent via a couple of USB hub ICs to provide the USB ports and also feeds the ethernet controller. Sure, a conventional Thunderbolt dock such as my Caldigit has a PCIe based ethernet controller and uses PCIe USB controllers instead of USB provided by the Thunderbolt IC, but in my situation especially where I'm using an external NIC, it works equally as well.

​@@camerongray1515 As you correctly pointed out, the fact the the module with the cable exists in both a USB-C and Thunderbolt variety while the rest of the dock is the same, is a clear indication that the main module is a USB-C hub. This means that all the USB ports and the ethernet port on the dock are sharing the same 10Gbps bandwidth. The video output ports are an exception as they are extracting a DisplayPort video signal out of USB-C (see DisplayPort Alt Mode). In the end, you are going from Thunderbolt to USB-C to drive anything connected to the main unit and taking away bandwidth from the 10Gbps NIC by daisy chaining it via the Thunderbolt port on the "adapter" bit. While I do understand the appeal of a one-cable-rules-them-all approach, this is not the right compromise to make, IMHO. I have a much simpler setup (single external monitor), where I use a USB-C dock with power delivery passthrough with my Mac, to get assorted USB ports, 1GB ethernet and a useless HDMI port that outputs 4k@30Hz (which I don't use), and a separate USB-C to DisplayPort adapter to drive a 4K display at 60Hz. It does pretty much the same as it leverages USB-C on one side, and Alt DisplayPort on the other, but it costs about £24. As you mentioned PC Users would have a better time, due to the way DisplayPort has been crippled by Apple.

​@@camerongray1515 Of course UKposts does not like my comment. Let me try again, with a shorter and less articulated version... As you correctly pointed out, the main part of the dock is entirely USB-C. In the end, while I appreciate the desire of using a single cable, you downgraded to an inferior dock, just for the TB passthrough capability. I would have kept the old dock and connected the 10Gbps NIC to the other TB port on the Mac. There is an OWC TB hub with 1 TB port in, 3 TB ports out and a single USB-A 10Gbps which could be interesting, as you could drive monitors off the TB ports, and maybe daisy chain the 10Gbpbs NIC as well. Said that, I did enjoy the video.

Ultimately it entirely comes down to personal preference and people are welcome to make their own decisions. I'm more than happy to lose a small amount of upload network bandwidth (where even 7gbps is completely exessive for my needs) and gain the convenience of a single cable. In addition to the MacBooks, I also often use a Framework laptop which, while the ports are modular, I usually have a single USB-C port module on each side so docking with a pair of USB-C cables would get messy. As for the dock being a downgrade - sure, the Caldigit dock maybe had more total USB bandwidth (although I've not sat down with the datasheets of the various ICs to investigate this) but you also need to look at my use case - the only USB devices I'm actually using on the dock are a keyboard and a USB 2.0 audio interface, so whether the dock is limited to 10gbps USB bandwidth or not, it really doesn't matter to me. The only high bandwidth USB devices I use are the portable SSDs that my camera records to, and I generally connect those directly to the laptop so that I can undock and take the laptop to another room without having to close down any editing projects. And of course there are going to be better docks out there with higher peak USB bandwidth and PCIe NICs, but remember, I picked up this dock for £79! It's also worth mentioning that I have experienced issues with USB audio interfaces connected to the Caldigit where the audio would occasionally "blip" or drop out for a fraction of a second periodically to the extent that I ended up using the optical output with an external DAC, these issues have never occurred with the Dell.

@@camerongray1515 yes, it's all about a balance between convenience and outcome in the end. Other people could benefit from understanding that this is a TB to USB-C hub and decide to buy the plain USB-C version if they have no thunderbolt devices whatsoever and want to save even more money. I'd still look into that OWC hub, even to just to make a video about it. Worst case scenario you could always send it back. 😉

I covered this at 06:13 - To use multiple display outputs from the dock itself, the computer needs to support DisplayPort MST. This is available on most PCs, but Macs don't support it. On a Mac, the only way to use multiple displays is by connecting the second display to a Thunderbolt passthrough port.

Nah, I've used it before but I'd generally avoid it unless it's absolutely required - the additional CPU load isn't ideal and the image always looks pretty compressed. I'd only ever really use it if I needed more monitors than the machine can physically support.

I covered this at 06:13 - Those multiple display outputs rely on DisplayPort MST which Macs don't support so you can only use them to extend your desktop with a PC. When using a Mac the only option for multiple displays is to connect one to the dock's display outputs, and the other to the Thunderbolt passthrough port.

A generous response from Cameron. I will add: WATCH THE VIDEO BEFORE QUESTIONING MATE!

It's not about internet connection speed, I access files on a local NAS and often have to move large video files around my local network, so the 10Gb NIC really helps with that. As for working stationary with a laptop - the whole point of this setup is to allow me to work at my desk with a full size keyboard and multiple monitors and then simply unplug the laptop and take it with me if I want to work elsewhere. If I used a desktop, I'd have to be constantly shifting files between it and a laptop - I did this for many years before finally getting rid of it and moving completely to a laptop which works much better for me. With this setup I can also effortlessly switch between my personal and work laptops. When it comes to Apple, sure they don't support MST and that's pretty annoying but I still vastly prefer Mac OS to Windows as a desktop OS and I'm not going to change my entire OS and workflow over it which is something I can easily work around. As for the Mac Studio - what benefit would DisplayPort bring? Any of the Thunderbolt ports can be connected to a display using an inexpensive USB-C to DP cable and if you're not using them for a display, they can be used for other Thunderbolt devices. If instead they put regular DisplayPort ports on they could only ever be used for displays and would likely mean that other ports would have to be removed to fit them.

I could, but the point of this setup is to be able to dock everything over a single cable, the very slight bandwidth limitation that the dock introduces really isn't a huge deal in the overall scheme of things so I'd rather still have the convenience of a single cable.

You should have tested it that way to validate your conclusion about the bottleneck for upload speeds though.

I did test that when I was initially testing out all the hardware and could get full speeds using iPerf with the NIC connected directly to the laptop. Unfortunately I completely forgot to add that testing into the video.

You are aware that languages aren't completely universal? At least where I am in the UK/Scotland, saying "these ones.etc" is relatively normal and while it's maybe not the most "grammatically correct" thing, it's completely normal to hear. Likewise, there are tonnes of regional phrases/words that are barely even English yet are completely commonplace. Also, there is much more to someone's intelligence than their grammatical ability, or their skills in any singular subject for that matter!

A desktop PC wouldn't be portable and I don't want to be tied to a desk. I spent many years with a desktop PC and separate laptop and it was a complete pain constantly needing to switch between them. The beauty of this setup is I can work at my desk then simply unplug one cable and take the machine to work from elsewhere. I can also very easily swap between my personal and work laptops.

That’s because he’s English, speaking English. I agree he speaks with a regional accent, but that is where your language comes from my friend.