- CalDigit sponsored this video to check out a whole bunch of ways that you can up your dongle game.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen, don't be using some pinner, lame dongle.
For serious though, there are some pretty sweet dongles in here. This right here is a 10 Gigabyte networking dongle.
Give me a second, I just wanna show you my dongle. Oh yeah, there we go.
Oh, that's a thick boy of a dongle.
And so it's Thunderbolt on one end, so as long as you've got a Thunderbolt-compliant PC
or a Mac computer, you just plug it into this puppy,
and boom, 10 Gig Ethernet. Let's try it out.
I think they actually included, ah, yeah, there we go. We've got a Thunderbolt 3 cable included.
Why did I put my knife away?
All right. CalDigit makes some pretty good shizz.
I actually use one of their docs from my crazy weird Thunderbolt PC in a different room
setup at home. We're setting up the Ethernet controller.
Oh, nope, okay, you've got to go grab a driver. Well, I guess that's fair enough.
Windows driver, there it is. Perfect. Let's see how fast their download server is.
You can tell a lot about a company and how much they care by how fast their downloads are.
That was very fast. It's already done.
Cool. And now I'm expecting, boom, there it is.
10 gigabit network adapter. And because it's Thunderbolt, you can actually probably get 10 gigabit performance
out of it. Pretty sweet. It's amazing how much cooling
this thing apparently requires. Look at that.
All right, but that's not the one that's actually going to be practical
to the majority of people out there. The main one they wanted us to feature today
is the Soho dock. Not all laptops have Thunderbolt,
but pretty much anything you buy today outside of like very,
very budget machines is probably going to have a USB type-C connector.
And what that means is that you can use one of these.
So what sets this puppy apart compared to other USB type-C hubs,
because there's tons of them out, is a couple of things.
One, it's got, I think, 100 watts of USB pass-through power delivery.
So that means even if you've got a powerful machine, it can be charged while your adapter
is also powering the dock here. The other thing that stands out about this one,
check that out. HDMI 2.0, which means you can run 4k 60 Hertz
with a single display and it's got DisplayPort 1.4,
so that means you can do 4k 60 Hertz there, or if you want to do two displays,
it depends whether you're running mirroring or extended,
but you can have two of them running it up to 4k 30 Hertz.
Anyway, what's cool about these is that they actually use different lanes than the USB ports
so they're not sharing bandwidth. So your USB devices aren't going to slow down
when you're using display devices. Really nice finish to it, actually.
All right, so let's go ahead and plug this puppy in. Hey Jono, what's that monitor?
Is that a 4k monitor? - [Jono] No, it's a 1080p, 360 Hertz.
- 1080p, 360 Hertz. Well, let's try it.
I want to see what happens if we plug it into a DisplayPort 1.4 port on this thing.
Now I'm using a Thunderbolt 3 cable right now, but because this is a type-C hub,
it's only acting as a USB cable right now. It's not actually acting as a Thunderbolt cable.
Thanks Jono. Oh, I should plug it into power.
It can be used in passive mode, but obviously it's going to work better if you power it
and fill it up with devices. Okay, so here's how it works.
The connection to your computer goes there.
The power connection goes over on this side where the DisplayPort and HDMI is,
and then everything you plug in goes here. So you've got 10 gigabit per second, right,
that's the last special thing about this one? A lot of these are five gigabit per second hubs,
but this one's 10 gig. You've got a USB type-A,
and then of course you've got an SD card reader and a micro SD reader.
All right, here we go. Let's see if this works. One thing you should watch out for,
you can actually see my laptop's giving me an error about slow charging.
That's because I'm using my laptops included power adapter
to go into the hub. It doesn't have any access. So it actually has to power all the devices
that I have plugged into this. So if I have an RGB keyboard and a desk fan
and a high performance, oh, something like a high performance external SSD
or something like that, that's less power that my laptop can take
for actually charging itself. So it means either it will charge more slowly,
or if you really overload it, it won't charge while it is passed through
and all these other things are being powered. Let's plug in the Tuff Nano.
Oh, wow, look at this. The SSD comes in a nice little case and everything.
So it comes with a type-A to type-C as well as a type-C to type-C.
Conveniently, CalDigit provided me with everything I need to validate their claims
that this thing won't slow down when I am using DisplayPort and HDMI.
How about that? Okay, I'll plug that in.
My apologies to whoever has to clean this up. Jono.
- [Jono] Yep. - So let's see if this works.
So we're at 144 and let's go ahead and try and transfer some data to our external drive here.
One problem we have is that I don't think my internal SSD
is fast enough to fully saturate this external one, but I guess we'll find out soon enough.
Oh, 500 megabytes a second. Yeah, okay.
- [Andy] You can use the Blackmagic Speed Test.
- Hmm, that's a good idea. All right, select target drive, start.
700 megabytes a second. Not too shabby.
Now, that's not fully saturating 10 gigabit,
but as far as external drives go, that's okay. Read are right up there.
900 megabytes a second. Not bad at all.
700 write, 900 read. Sure, so as long as you're not trying to do 10-bit,
422, 4k 50 or 60 FPS, you should be in pretty good shape.
Sweet. And all of this while we're running a DisplayPort monitor.
Now the question is, will it do better if I pull out
the DisplayPort connection?
I just want to know more? Okay, nope, that's right in the same range.
Okay, but wait, there's still more that we can know.
Now, let's take it out of the hub and put it straight
into a type-C port. Cool. So as advertised, the performance is identical
whether you've got a display connection plugged in or not.
Of course, I wouldn't be able to finish this video
without talking about my personal favorite of everything that's here, the TS3-Plus,
I actually freaking love this thing.
Now, I don't use it for a laptop. I actually use it for my desktop.
But what sick about it is it's got, I think it's something like 87 Watts of power delivery
with the included adapter, which also has enough capacity for you
to put much freaking load the thing up
with everything else that you could want to plug into it. And the reason that I ultimately chose this one
for my personal setup was because it has so many ports.
Like it has ports for days, and it's not huge.
Some of them I don't even use. Like I don't need an Ethernet jack,
because obviously, networking is plugged in in my server room. But it's got daisy-chain support.
So you plug in via Thunderbolt to your computer, and then you've got another Thunderbolt port
so you can go plug into something else. It has got DisplayPort.
No HDMI, but that's not a big problem for me because you can just adapt DisplayPort to HDMI very easily.
Optical audio. That's like what?
10 gig USB, four more five gig USBs.
Then around the front, I use it as an SD card reader
all the time. For me, this is great. Two more five gig USBs, one type-A, one type-C,
headphone, and I think, that's like a line out
or something like that. A line in or something like that?
I don't use that either because I have my own audio interface. But it's just all the USB ports
and the fact that it handles them all gracefully without any weird issues.
In fact, I had a weird issue with my other, just like no-name hub the other day on the stream
and I was able to fix it by plugging my audio interface
into this puppy instead. Just freaking works. Love this thing.
Is there anything else I'm supposed to talk about? USB-C DisplayPort adaptor.
That seems fairly self-explanatory. Active DisplayPort to HDMI.
These are really useful. Is this an HDMI 2.0? Yeah, these are great.
So if you want to, for example, let's say,
run your 4k 60 Hertz TV, that's what I have one of these for at home.
I didn't use to have a graphics card that had HDMI 2.0,
but I did have DisplayPort 1.2, which can do 4k 60.
So you can use one of these to adapt it if you only have an older HDMI port.
That's my sales pitch for that. If you guys enjoyed this video,
subscribe to ShortCircuit and I'll see you there.
(whispering faintly)