Plugable TBT-UDT3 review: The affordable, fast Thunderbolt 5 dock I recommend | usagoldmines.com

At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

• $300 MSRP seems reasonable
• Thunderbolt 5
• Three-display capability, or two displays plus an SSD
• Thunderbolt Share is included
• Stable

Cons

• You’ll probablly need to buy display adapter cables
• No active cooling, but it didn’t seem to need it

Our Verdict

Plugable’s 11-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 (TBT-UDT3) docking station is a solid all-around TB5 dock with a great mix of features and ports. Pair it with a TB5 SSD and you’ve got impressive storage performance.

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Plugable’s 11-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 (TBT-UDT3) docking station is a moderately priced Thunderbolt 5 dock that can future-proof your PC for years to come. While it might not offer the dedicated display ports of older docks, its integrated Thunderbolt Share delivers file sharing and a KVM-like experience, for free.

What Plugable doesn’t offer is integrated storage or active cooling, saving your wallet some additional cash. Just keep in mind that you may have to make up for that by buying some additional display cables.

Plugable TBT-UDT3: Design and build

Plugable calls this dock the Plugable Thunderbolt 5 Dock with 3x Thunderbolt 5 ports, 140W Laptop Charging, or TBT-UDT3. It’s a rather compact Thunderbolt 5 docking station, measuring 6.9 x 1.6 x 3.1 inches. I’ve always been somewhat partial to docks which utilize vertical space, such as the HP Thunderbolt G4 Dock, simply because my desk doesn’t have that much space on it. Plugable’s dock can fit into a vertical stand included in the package. This maximizes your available desk space even more.

The TBT-UDT3 is made of aluminum and ABS plastic. These two materials weave their way in and out of the chassis. You’ll find metal coating the top and bottom (if mounted flat, not vertically) which feels necessary. The dock was fairly warm inside my air-conditioned office, using two 4K displays connected via the dock’s included Thunderbolt 5 cable. (That cable measures 39 inches, or 1 meter long.) Some TB5 docks include active cooling, with an external fan; the TBT-UDT3 does not. That’s possibly a corner Plugable cut, but it doesn’t seem to have affected its stability at all.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

I usually refer to docking stations without dedicated display ports as hubs, not docks. In this case, Plugable’s TBT-UDT3 includes two Thunderbolt 5 ports on the rear of the dock, and one in front. All three can be used for display connections.

Make sure you choose the proper cable for the job. A Thunderbolt 4 dock at 60Hz can use a USB-C to HDMI adapter that supports 4K60 output. That works fine with this Thunderbolt 5 dock, too. But a TB5 dock (like this one) should output a 4K display at 144Hz per port–you’ll need a slightly more expensive cable (about $25 apiece).

Specifically, Plugable’s dock puts its power button on front, lit by a bright white LED which, accidentally or not, leaks into the internal ports, giving them a faint glow and making them easier to insert connections inside a dim room. The front of the dock also includes both a microSD and SD card slot at 312MB/S UHS-II speeds, a 10Gbps USB-A port, a Thunderbolt 5 port, plus a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the rear are two more Thunderbolt 5 ports, both a 5Gbps and 10Gbps USB-A port, the downstream TB5 connection to the PC, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet jack, and two lock ports.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Plugable’s dock doesn’t really offer charging capabilities — one rear USB-A port supplies 7.5W — but you can certainly plug in a phone to an unused USB-C/Thunderbolt 5 port, which is rated for 15W of power for a phone or an external device of some sort. It actually provided 13.9W under load. That used to be enough to fast-charge a smartphone like a Samsung Galaxy S19, but can’t really keep up with the high-speed charging power used by recent iPhones or Android phones, which fast-charge at 45W or higher.

Keep in mind that the full charging capabilities of Thunderbolt 5 go up to 240W. This dock taps out at 140W. On the other hand, Thunderbolt 5 is (for now) confined to gaming laptops, and those laptops generally pull close to 400W or more while gaming under load. Put another way, even 240W isn’t going to cut it for gaming, right now. That power supply might be suitable for tomorrow’s content-creation/light gaming notebook, but not now.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Plugable’s dock also includes an unexpected bonus: Thunderbolt Share, a technology that came and went without a lot of fanfare from the mobile community. Using Thunderbolt Share, two PCs can share files over a Thunderbolt connection, or two PCs can share a single screen. However, Thunderbolt Share requires that the PCs download the Thunderbolt Share app. One of the devices must also have a Thunderbolt Share license — or, in this case, the dock. Only then is Thunderbolt Share allowed to work. (You can see our video demonstration of Thunderbolt Share, here.)

Plugable TBT-UDT3: Performance

For these tests, I used Razer’s Blade 18, which includes a Thunderbolt 5 port as well as a separate Thunderbolt 4 connection. On that laptop, Plugable’s dock seemed almost perfectly stable. It connected to a pair of 4K160 displays at the dock’s rated speed of 144Hz, my test bed’s default configuration.

It also connected perfectly to a third 4K160 display at 144Hz, too, as it should. In this scenario, however, my test laptop’s display wouldn’t light up until I rebooted. After it did so, all three external displays lit up at 144Hz, plus the laptop’s display. The laptop/dock combination couldn’t handle streaming 4K60 video to all displays, but static Web pages loaded with no issue.

I also connected it to my daily laptop, with a Thunderbolt 4 port, and I had no issues using Plugable’s same dock with the same 4K displays at 60 Hz.

When I accidentally powered off the dock when trying to insert it into its vertical stand, there was a bit of “panic,” where the displays cycled through and flipped on and off for a few seconds. That was user error, however, and the dock and the connected displays worked quite well thereafter. While the dock had some issues bringing up the displays when connected to an older TB4 laptop that was resuming from sleep, that problem did not manifest on the Blade 18 and its TB5 port.

I’ve been testing Thunderbolt docks for several years using a standardized methodology. Thunderbolt 5, however, requires an update to my test procedures.

I stream 4K video at 60Hz across two displays, then three — Plugable’s dock handled it like a champ without dropping more than a handful of frames. Streaming data from an attached SSD, though, is a bit more challenging with a higher-bandwidth Thunderbolt 5 dock. OWC kindly provided us with an Envoy Ultra SSD, rated at Thunderbolt 5 speeds. That puts more pressure on the dock itself to keep up.

To date, there just haven’t been that many Thunderbolt 5 docks available. Most of my reviews cover Thunderbolt 3 and 4, so this dock, along with the Sonnet Echo 13 Thunderbolt 5 Dock, represent a small cadre of the fastest docks available. As it happens, the performance of the two is roughly comparable.

I ran PCMark’s storage test against the Envoy Ultra, both directly connected and also connected to a Thunderbolt 5 port on the dock. Directly connected, the Envoy Ultra returned a bandwidth score of 469MB/s or a score of 3,202. Connected to the dock’s TB5 port, performance dropped to 437MB/s or a score of 2,920. That’s a 7 percent drop, and basically identical to the 436MB/s bandwidth score that the Sonnet Echo 13 yielded when the Envoy Ultra was connected to its Thunderbolt 5 port.

While streaming the two 4K videos across the integrated Ethernet port, performance dropped to 402.77 MB/s, since some of the bandwidth was taken up by the Ethernet port.

Only my folder copy test, which measures how long it takes to copy a bundle of files from an SSD through the dock to the desktop, showed any real difference from the Sonnet: 13.9 seconds for the Sonnet, and 16.9 seconds for the Plugable dock, or 14.2 seconds vs 18.96 seconds while streaming.

I tested Thunderbolt Share, which crashed the first time I tried it. (I didn’t notice that OneDrive was syncing in the background.) Using one laptop to control another worked fine. I was able to transfer my folder of files in about 54 seconds, slightly faster than my Thunderbolt 4 dock tests. That’s reasonable, given that both a Thunderbolt 4 laptop and a Thunderbolt 5 laptop were connected to the TBT-UDT3.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

It might be worth noting that that the rival Sonnet Echo 13 includes a 2TB integrated SSD and costs $439 at press time; Plugable’s dock does not include an SSD, and OWC’s Envoy Ultra (2TB) costs about $300 alone at press time. On the other hand, the internal bandwidth of the Sonnet’s internal SSD was 279.84MB/s, substantially less than the Plugable + OWC SSD combination.

The bandwidth of Sonnet’s internal SSD is similar to what you might expect of external gaming SSDs. On the other hand, the read and write speeds of the OWC Envoy Ultra plus the Thunderbolt 5 connection push upwards into the speeds of a good internal PCIe4 SSD, and that’s worth something, too.

The one thing I didn’t test is how well this dock accommodates an external GPU. That’s a capability that’s built in (again) to Thunderbolt 5, but I don’t think an eGPU makes a compelling argument yet if TB5 ports are only found within gaming PCs already equipped with discrete GPUs.

Plugable TBT-UDT3: Conclusion

I would, yes. Generally I hope for premium Thunderbolt docks to be in the $250 range or a little lower, and $299 seems pretty reasonable for a premium dock — though you may have to add display adapter cables to that price. A two-year warranty is included. Though this dock does offer access to three displays, you might find that connecting two displays plus a high-speed SSD works best for you. Interestingly, all of the Thunderbolt 5 docks I’ve seen do not add dedicated display ports, as their TB4 and TB3 offerings did.

Don’t forget about Thunderbolt Share, either. It’s not a technology you might use often; after all, you can always connect a hard drive to the dock, copy a file to the drive, replace the laptop with another, and download the file. Still, it’s an interesting twist that most docks don’t offer.

If you’re interested in future-proofing your PC, though, the combination of the high-speed display options Thunderbolt 5 offers, plus Thunderbolt Share, and the additional performance a high-speed external TB5 SSD offers makes this dock really intriguing. I really liked the flexibility the SSD inside the Sonnet Echo 13 offered, but Plugable offers an alternative with a different but very viable perspective.