Kensington EQ Professional Thunderbolt 5 Dock for MacBook assessment: Quick with particular visitor stars

Value When Reviewed

$449.99

Greatest Costs Right this moment: Kensington EQ Professional Thunderbolt 5 Dock for MacBook

Kensington’s EQ Professional Thunderbolt 5 Dock for MacBook, identified to its mates because the SD7100TS, is a dock stacked with 19 ports, a devoted SSD slot so that you can add additional storage, and particular Mac sizzling keys for simple iPhone picture backup and a Focus Mode.

It even has “Designed for MacBook” on the field, however this may very well be as a result of Home windows hasn’t fairly caught the Thunderbolt 5 wave but.

This can be a horizontal docking station with stable attractiveness in a gunmetal-gray with properly rounded corners.

Dock specs

• One upstream Thunderbolt 5 port (80Gbps, 140W)
• Three downstream Thunderbolt 5 ports (80Gbps, 15W)
• One USB-C port (10Gbps, 30W)
• One USB-C port (10Gbps, 7.5W)
• 4 USB-A ports (10Gbps, 4.5W)
• Ethernet (2.5Gb)
• NVMe M.2 SSD slot (up to8TB)
• UHS-II SD card reader (312MBps)
• UHS-II microSD card reader (312MBps)
• One 3.5mm combo audio In/Out jack (entrance)
• One 3.5mm audio In jack (again)
• One 3.5mm audio Out jack (again)
• One TOSLINK optical audio (again)
• 180W energy provide

Simon Jary

Kensington has determined in opposition to together with a devoted video port resembling HDMI or DisplayPort in favor of the complete set of Thunderbolt 5 ports. Whereas which may imply you must provide your personal USB-C to HDMI/DP adapter cable in case your monitor doesn’t assist a USB-C/Thunderbolt connection, it does give you extra flexibility in selecting what you need every port to do. If a dock has a DisplayPort or HDMI port, for example, and also you wish to join through Thunderbolt, that video port is wasted. Having the utmost three downstream Thunderbolt 5 docks offers you the liberty to determine what to make use of every port for.

Thunderbolt 5 (TB5) is backwards appropriate with Thunderbolt 4 and three, so even when your Mac isn’t but constructed for TB5, you may relaxation assured that it’s going to work with earlier Thunderbolt variations and be prepared on your eventual TB5 Mac improve.

Thunderbolt 5 Macs get 80Gbps data-transfer charges and as much as 120Gbps in Bandwidth Enhance mode for top-end video calls for.

One TB5 port is “upstream”, that means it connects to your Mac. The opposite three are “downstream” for connecting different gadgets resembling displays and storage drives.

Simon Jary

Energy

One TB5 port is on the entrance, which could swimsuit you however strikes me as odd and a possible reason behind cable-clutter, particularly as there’s a 30W 10Gbps USB-C port on the entrance already—properly positioned for charging your iPhone and even connecting a wi-fi charger.

Additionally on the entrance is one other 10Gbps USB-C port with a weaker 7.5W energy score. The Thunderbolt ports are rated at 15W. The 4 legacy USB-A ports are lower than a lot charging at simply 4.5W.

Certainly, the EQ Professional feels a bit under-powered, with a max 180W energy provide. The PD 3.1-rated upstream Thunderbolt 5 port is nice, supplying as much as 140W: sufficient to fast-charge even the top-end 16-inch MacBook Professional, and the 30W USB-C is meaty. The opposite ports most likely have all the ability your related gadgets require however as compared the CalDigit TS5 Plus has 330W for its two 36W TB5 ports and 36W USB-C, and the Sonnet Echo 13 has a 60W TB5 port.

A “KonstantCharge” characteristic permits gadgets to be charged even when the dock isn’t related to a laptop computer, so you should utilize it like a desktop charger. In his charging exams my PCWorld colleague Mark Hachman discovered the 30W charging port delivered 28.6W below load, and the opposite USB-C port supplied about 6W. The downstream Thunderbolt 5 ports delivered 13.6W of energy.

On the again of the dock is an influence button, which we recognize as many docking stations don’t have them. Though trendy gadgets have refined battery safeguards and battery administration, I favor to not preserve my MacBook always related to an influence supply. Sure, I can pull the cable out however an On/Off button is cleaner and fewer carrying on the {hardware}.

The ability provide is rated at 180W, so is the utmost shared energy load the dock can provide. With a attainable 240W of port energy potential, plus the ability wanted by the dock and SSD slot, that 18W is lower than the complete load. Different docks supply 240W (and even 300W for the CalDigit TS5 Plus), which might have made extra sense than an under-powered 180W energy provide. It’s seemingly that 180W will probably be sufficient at most occasions, however a 240W charger would have been a extra good selection from Kensington.

Community pace

The dock matches comparable Thunderbolt 5 docks with a sooner 2.5Gbps Ethernet port. Even when your community is caught at 1Gb Gigabit Ethernet, it’s backwards appropriate so builds in additional future-proofing to your setup.

Audio

From an audio perspective, in addition to a single 3.5mm mixture mic/headphone jack on the entrance of the dock, there are separate mic, speaker, and headphone I/O ports, plus an optical connection to cross lossless audio to some high-end audio methods—a boon for these enhancing video or audio.

Simon Jary

Hotkeys

One other curiosity bonus characteristic is the set of two hotkeys on the highest of the dock; pictured above. These embrace one for backing up your iPhone images and movies to your Mac or SSD plus one other providing a Focus Mode for Mac, together with ‘Do Not Disturb’, or you may customise the buttons for different features utilizing the Kensington Konnect. Turning on Do Not Disturb is fairly simple anyway through Management Heart within the Mac’s prime menu bar, but it surely’s undeniably slightly simpler with a bodily button. Mess around within the software program to hone these buttons to your personal one-touch performance necessities.

Transportable storage

On the entrance are two quick UHS-II SD/MicroSD card reader slots, and as a shock bonus even CF 4.0 (CompactFlash) card slot that may please these skilled photographers who use older high-end DSLRs that require it. The EQ Professional is the one trendy docking station we’ve seen with certainly one of these.

Simon Jary

Tremendous retailer

A characteristic that’s turning into extra widespread with docking stations is an built-in PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure. That is normally discovered on the underside of the dock, however the Kensington EQ Professional has it on the highest, secured by a screw on one facet of the dock itself; see our picture above. You’ll want your personal tiny Phillips cross-head screwdriver as Kensington doesn’t embrace one within the field—different dock makers resembling Ugreen and iVanky do embrace a screwdriver, so this will probably be missed as you search your workplace or residence for one the appropriate dimension.

Apple doesn’t make MacBook storage low cost—the 14-inch MacBook Professional comes with 1TB as the bottom degree, with 2TB costing an additional $400 and 4TB a whopping $1,000! When you’ve bought, you may’t return so as to add extra.

The dock doesn’t include an NVMe M.2 SSD, not like the Sonnet Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 SSD Dock that’s offered as 1TB ($479), 2TB ($649) and 4TB ($999) fashions. Go to Amazon to discover a NVMe M.2 SSD from a dependable model, resembling Samsung, WD and SanDisk. 1TB ought to price round $150-200, 2TB round $350 and 4TB $600-700. Storage costs are notoriously unstable so you discover them extra reasonably priced or costlier once you’re looking for one.

Kensington

Shows: M5 Professional/Max imply extra displays

Whereas Thunderbolt 4 docks proceed to be capped at two exterior shows on the Mac, the most recent top-end M5 Professional and M5 Max chips assist as much as three exterior shows with the Kensington EQ Professional. The M5 Max can deal with 4 however as there aren’t sufficient ports to hold so many displays off you’ll must daisy-chain the fourth display from the third.

Most decision for a dual-monitor setup is 2 6K displays at 60Hz. A single 8K/60Hz show is feasible with M5/M4 Base/Professional/Max plus Professional/Max variations of the M1/M2/M3 chipped Macs.

Simon Jary

Kensington EQ Professional efficiency

From a efficiency standpoint, Kensington’s dock was barely slower than different Thunderbolt 5 docks examined by my colleague Mark: the Sonnet Echo 13 transferred knowledge from our take a look at SSD at about 436MBps, whereas the Plugable TBT-UDT3 was about the identical. Kensington’s drive transferred knowledge at 398MBps, or 9% slower. The EQ Professional boasts extra ports, although, bear in mind.

We copied a number of gigabytes of information from a folder on my desktop to the dock’s SSD. The dock carried out usually, taking about 16 seconds. (Sonnet’s dock is the quickest right here, at about 14 seconds.) Whereas streaming, that dropped to 17.3 seconds. Clearly, that distinction would enlarge the extra knowledge you transferred at a time.

Our exams discovered that that SSD inside Kensington’s dock carried out basically the identical because the Razer Thunderbolt Dock Chroma, one other Thunderbolt 5 dock with an M.2. SSD slot, when performing a folder copy: 16.8 seconds by itself, and 17.5 seconds whereas streaming 4K video.

Foundry / Mark Hachman

Value

The Kensington EQ Professional Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station is priced at $449.99. For a dock with this many ports that is comparable with the 15-port $399 CalDigit TS5 or 23-port iVanky FusionDock Max 2, each of which lack the SSD enclosure. The $479 Sonnet Echo 13 has the built-in SSD slot (with SSD included from $479 for 1TB) however fewer ports and the $499 Ugreen 17-in-1 Maxidok has the slot however fewer ports, so the Kensington EQ Professional measures up nicely when in comparison with docks with that characteristic.

To get full worth from this dock you’ll wish to add the SSD card, which is able to up the associated fee considerably but in addition massively enrich your Mac setup with a ton extra upgradable storage at hand.

Must you purchase the Kensington EQ Professional Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station (SD7100TS)?

$449 (plus the price of the SSD if you wish to use this dock to its full potential) is some huge cash however for the extent of connectivity (19 ports!) and a tidy storage M.2 enclosure it’s extra reasonably priced than its closest rivals. The optical audio port, CompactFlash slot and sizzling keys are good extras hardly ever discovered on docking stations.