If you are a Mac user, you know that Thunderbolt 3 is one of the most powerful communication standards available on the market. Thunderbolt 3 is a single port that essentially provides power and high speed data transfer to and from all your peripherals. If you wanted to connect multiple peripherals and devices to your Apple MacBook Pro for example, through one Thunderbolt 3 port, you will need a Thunderbolt 3 dock.
Belkin has devised the new Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD that does exactly that. It lets you covert one port into a whole plethora of connections. What’s more – you can also daisy-chain up to five Thunderbolt devices from the dock. Connectivity options are a boatload.
With the Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD, you get two Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports, three USB-A 3.0 ports (1.5A charging each), one DisplayPort, one Audio In/Out port; one Audio Out port, and one Gigabit Ethernet port. You also get a 170W power adapter that provides enough power to support attached peripherals while delivering 85W of power to your computer through included Thunderbolt 3 cable. Phew, that was quite a mouthful.
The overall design and build quality is brilliant – something that we have come to expect of products by Belkin. The Belkin Thunderbolt 3 dock offers up to 40 Gbit/s of bandwidth, allowing this dock to offer a ton of functionality while remaining compact. You plug in your charger to your dock, and the dock to your computer.
It then keeps your laptop fully charged, while giving you access to a number of important ports for data, video, and audio. The dock also supports dual-4K, with the DisplayPort and the Thunderbolt 3 pass-through port utilised for displays.
Once you plug in the dock, you don’t need to install any drivers to setup the dock. It is a simple plug and play device and it works perfectly from a basic functionality standpoint both in macOS and in a Bootcamp installation of Windows 10. Mass storage devices, input devices, and output devices all work perfectly, just like they were natively plugged into the host computer.
We had no issues when testing the device. All the devices connected through the dock worked perfectly well. Connectivity through Ethernet was solid and audio experience was also quite good.
All in all, the Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD does everything that it claims to do on paper. It definitely isn’t the cheapest Thunderbolt 3 dock out there on the market. However, if you want a dependable dock from an established brand that won’t let you down, the Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD should definitely be on top of your list.
Price: $349 (AED 1280 approx.)
