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- CalDigit sponsored this video to check out a whole bunch of ways that you can up your dongle game.

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That's right, ladies and gentlemen, don't be using some pinner, lame dongle.

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For serious though, there are some pretty sweet dongles in here. This right here is a 10 Gigabyte networking dongle.

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Give me a second, I just wanna show you my dongle. Oh yeah, there we go.

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Oh, that's a thick boy of a dongle.

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And so it's Thunderbolt on one end, so as long as you've got a Thunderbolt-compliant PC

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or a Mac computer, you just plug it into this puppy,

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and boom, 10 Gig Ethernet. Let's try it out.

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I think they actually included, ah, yeah, there we go. We've got a Thunderbolt 3 cable included.

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Why did I put my knife away?

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All right. CalDigit makes some pretty good shizz.

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I actually use one of their docs from my crazy weird Thunderbolt PC in a different room

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setup at home. We're setting up the Ethernet controller.

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Oh, nope, okay, you've got to go grab a driver. Well, I guess that's fair enough.

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Windows driver, there it is. Perfect. Let's see how fast their download server is.

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You can tell a lot about a company and how much they care by how fast their downloads are.

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That was very fast. It's already done.

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Cool. And now I'm expecting, boom, there it is.

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10 gigabit network adapter. And because it's Thunderbolt, you can actually probably get 10 gigabit performance

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out of it. Pretty sweet. It's amazing how much cooling

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this thing apparently requires. Look at that.

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All right, but that's not the one that's actually going to be practical

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to the majority of people out there. The main one they wanted us to feature today

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is the Soho dock. Not all laptops have Thunderbolt,

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but pretty much anything you buy today outside of like very,

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very budget machines is probably going to have a USB type-C connector.

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And what that means is that you can use one of these.

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So what sets this puppy apart compared to other USB type-C hubs,

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because there's tons of them out, is a couple of things.

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One, it's got, I think, 100 watts of USB pass-through power delivery.

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So that means even if you've got a powerful machine, it can be charged while your adapter

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is also powering the dock here. The other thing that stands out about this one,

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check that out. HDMI 2.0, which means you can run 4k 60 Hertz

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with a single display and it's got DisplayPort 1.4,

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so that means you can do 4k 60 Hertz there, or if you want to do two displays,

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it depends whether you're running mirroring or extended,

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but you can have two of them running it up to 4k 30 Hertz.

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Anyway, what's cool about these is that they actually use different lanes than the USB ports

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so they're not sharing bandwidth. So your USB devices aren't going to slow down

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when you're using display devices. Really nice finish to it, actually.

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All right, so let's go ahead and plug this puppy in. Hey Jono, what's that monitor?

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Is that a 4k monitor? - [Jono] No, it's a 1080p, 360 Hertz.

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- 1080p, 360 Hertz. Well, let's try it.

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I want to see what happens if we plug it into a DisplayPort 1.4 port on this thing.

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Now I'm using a Thunderbolt 3 cable right now, but because this is a type-C hub,

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it's only acting as a USB cable right now. It's not actually acting as a Thunderbolt cable.

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Thanks Jono. Oh, I should plug it into power.

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It can be used in passive mode, but obviously it's going to work better if you power it

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and fill it up with devices. Okay, so here's how it works.

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The connection to your computer goes there.

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The power connection goes over on this side where the DisplayPort and HDMI is,

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and then everything you plug in goes here. So you've got 10 gigabit per second, right,

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that's the last special thing about this one? A lot of these are five gigabit per second hubs,

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but this one's 10 gig. You've got a USB type-A,

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and then of course you've got an SD card reader and a micro SD reader.

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All right, here we go. Let's see if this works. One thing you should watch out for,

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you can actually see my laptop's giving me an error about slow charging.

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That's because I'm using my laptops included power adapter

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to go into the hub. It doesn't have any access. So it actually has to power all the devices

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that I have plugged into this. So if I have an RGB keyboard and a desk fan

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and a high performance, oh, something like a high performance external SSD

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or something like that, that's less power that my laptop can take

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for actually charging itself. So it means either it will charge more slowly,

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or if you really overload it, it won't charge while it is passed through

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and all these other things are being powered. Let's plug in the Tuff Nano.

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Oh, wow, look at this. The SSD comes in a nice little case and everything.

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So it comes with a type-A to type-C as well as a type-C to type-C.

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Conveniently, CalDigit provided me with everything I need to validate their claims

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that this thing won't slow down when I am using DisplayPort and HDMI.

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How about that? Okay, I'll plug that in.

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My apologies to whoever has to clean this up. Jono.

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- [Jono] Yep. - So let's see if this works.

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So we're at 144 and let's go ahead and try and transfer some data to our external drive here.

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One problem we have is that I don't think my internal SSD

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is fast enough to fully saturate this external one, but I guess we'll find out soon enough.

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Oh, 500 megabytes a second. Yeah, okay.

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- [Andy] You can use the Blackmagic Speed Test.

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- Hmm, that's a good idea. All right, select target drive, start.

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700 megabytes a second. Not too shabby.

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Now, that's not fully saturating 10 gigabit,

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but as far as external drives go, that's okay. Read are right up there.

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900 megabytes a second. Not bad at all.

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700 write, 900 read. Sure, so as long as you're not trying to do 10-bit,

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422, 4k 50 or 60 FPS, you should be in pretty good shape.

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Sweet. And all of this while we're running a DisplayPort monitor.

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Now the question is, will it do better if I pull out

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the DisplayPort connection?

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I just want to know more? Okay, nope, that's right in the same range.

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Okay, but wait, there's still more that we can know.

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Now, let's take it out of the hub and put it straight

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into a type-C port. Cool. So as advertised, the performance is identical

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whether you've got a display connection plugged in or not.

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Of course, I wouldn't be able to finish this video

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without talking about my personal favorite of everything that's here, the TS3-Plus,

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I actually freaking love this thing.

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Now, I don't use it for a laptop. I actually use it for my desktop.

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But what sick about it is it's got, I think it's something like 87 Watts of power delivery

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with the included adapter, which also has enough capacity for you

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to put much freaking load the thing up

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with everything else that you could want to plug into it. And the reason that I ultimately chose this one

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for my personal setup was because it has so many ports.

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Like it has ports for days, and it's not huge.

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Some of them I don't even use. Like I don't need an Ethernet jack,

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because obviously, networking is plugged in in my server room. But it's got daisy-chain support.

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So you plug in via Thunderbolt to your computer, and then you've got another Thunderbolt port

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so you can go plug into something else. It has got DisplayPort.

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No HDMI, but that's not a big problem for me because you can just adapt DisplayPort to HDMI very easily.

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Optical audio. That's like what?

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10 gig USB, four more five gig USBs.

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Then around the front, I use it as an SD card reader

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all the time. For me, this is great. Two more five gig USBs, one type-A, one type-C,

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headphone, and I think, that's like a line out

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or something like that. A line in or something like that?

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I don't use that either because I have my own audio interface. But it's just all the USB ports

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and the fact that it handles them all gracefully without any weird issues.

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In fact, I had a weird issue with my other, just like no-name hub the other day on the stream

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and I was able to fix it by plugging my audio interface

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into this puppy instead. Just freaking works. Love this thing.

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Is there anything else I'm supposed to talk about? USB-C DisplayPort adaptor.

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That seems fairly self-explanatory. Active DisplayPort to HDMI.

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These are really useful. Is this an HDMI 2.0? Yeah, these are great.

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So if you want to, for example, let's say,

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run your 4k 60 Hertz TV, that's what I have one of these for at home.

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I didn't use to have a graphics card that had HDMI 2.0,

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but I did have DisplayPort 1.2, which can do 4k 60.

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So you can use one of these to adapt it if you only have an older HDMI port.

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That's my sales pitch for that. If you guys enjoyed this video,

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subscribe to ShortCircuit and I'll see you there.

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(whispering faintly)