Is he holding balloons?
Congratulations on whatever you're celebrating.
Sponsored or not, and this one is sponsored by CalDigit.
I wouldn't normally make a video about a Thunderbolt dock.
I mean, how interesting could one of these possibly be?
The answer today is very.
This is the TS4, Thunderbolt Station 4 from CalDigit.
It features a whopping 18 ports of connectivity.
Oh my gosh, is this bigger than their old ones too?
Okay.
Excuse me, 18 ports of connectivity,
a total of 98 watts of power
to a connected Thunderbolt compatible computer,
and another 20 watts of charging
out of this Type-C on the front.
As for the rest of the ports,
they have more pedestrian power outputs,
but let's put it this way.
Altogether, you're looking at a power brick
that is not only large,
but also,
in charge.
Get it?
In charge.
It's large and charged.
Come on!
That's pretty funny.
The point is it's a 200 watt brick
for a freaking Thunderbolt dock.
I've sorted through all the accessories that matter.
This one right here is a two foot Thunderbolt 4 cable.
You can tell because it says Thunderbolt 4 on it.
Not particularly long,
but certainly long enough to plug into the back of the dock,
the one labeled computer.
There we go.
And connect to either the right or left side,
of your preferred device.
You can also stand it up like this,
but I'll talk a little bit more about that later.
You've also got the power brick that I talked about before,
as well as a standard C13 power connector that goes into it.
Cause this ain't no little boy.
I said I'd get to the alternative to standing it up.
You can also lay it down flat
with these little silicone feet things.
I think they've revised the design
a little bit over the years,
but fundamentally it's the same idea.
You just pick any one of the ribs
that you like along the bottom.
Oh, you know what?
I'm not gonna bother my OCD brothers in arms out there.
And I'm gonna put it on like this.
Monster.
I know.
You put those little feet on there,
a little something like that,
or however you prefer.
Flip that bad boy over.
And it's not gonna slip around on the table
when you go to plug in a cable.
We can actually, we can test that.
We can actually validate that.
Let's go ahead.
That slips a little.
Let's try it on a hard surface
instead of an LTTstore.com mouse pad.
Okay, it could be stickier.
The really exciting stuff is yet to come though,
because for me, it's not about the sheer number of ports
or even necessarily the power output,
because I use my Thunderbolt dock at a desktop.
For me, it's about the kind of connectivity.
So on the front, you've got your SD card,
you've got your micro SD.
Yeah, having both of those natively means
no more adapter sitting on my desk.
You've also got that 20 watt fast chargers.
So that's to quickly top up your phone
or what I'm gonna use it for
is I like to put my phone on a little stand
under my monitor when I'm streaming.
This will allow me to do that and charge at the same time.
I believe this one does seven and a half watts.
You've also got a type A on the front
because CalDigit does not discriminate against people
who still use type A.
Headphone, microphone, combo jack.
And then on the back, this right here.
Two and a half gigabit LAN, thank you.
This is the only dock on the market
that has two and a half gig Ethernet
combined with all this other connectivity
so that you can get lightning fast access
to network shared resources.
And the thing is that gigabit is fast enough
for transferring small files.
It's fine.
But today, if you wanna edit video off of a NAS,
you want two and a half gig
and now you've flipping got it.
It also conveniently has two more Thunderbolt ports
off of it.
That's a funny one.
I'd actually love to see how this is wired up electrically
because is it like the first two hops
of a six device daisy chain?
Couldn't actually answer that one for you.
For type A's, you've got a line in,
iPhone jack, if you don't like that combo port at the front,
another USB-C, but not Thunderbolt this time
and DisplayPort 1.4.
So on this bad boy,
you can do multiple high resolution displays,
dual 4Ks on Windows and up to dual 6K displays on Mac.
To be clear, that's not CalDigit's fault,
that particular limitation.
It's just because of the way
that Apple implements Thunderbolt system.
It's gone a little bit better.
One thing that it's missing is HDMI,
but this doesn't bother me because USB-C or display,
DisplayPort to HDMI adapters
are pretty much a dime a dozen.
In fact, they actually sent over a couple of those,
I think, to show off.
USB-C to HDMI 2.0,
does up to 4K 60, I would think.
It's HDMI 2.0.
So you put that bad boy on there.
Oh, and if you've got dual DisplayPort monitors
rather than dual Thunderbolt monitors,
oh, that's why they've got the two Thunderbolt ports,
because that's how they're doing the dual 5K
or dual 6K displays
on Mac.
There you go.
All right.
Well, if you're not on a Mac
and you need to convert one of those to a female,
whoops, DisplayPort adapter,
then that's how you're gonna run your dual 4Ks.
Très intéressant.
That's super cool.
Being a PC guy though,
I'm not going to be benefiting
from any of those Mac exclusive features.
Let's go ahead and hook it up to a gaming machine, shall we?
The big thing I wanna see here is two and a half gig LAN.
Thunderbolt on PC has really gotten
a lot better.
I mean, it was always a little better on laptops
than it was on desktops,
but I don't see a two and a half gig Ethernet port here.
Oh, here it is.
Now I got it already.
TS4 Windows Ethernet driver.
Does this laptop actually charge off of Type-C
in spite of the fact that it's a freaking gaming laptop?
Okay.
That's neat.
I don't know that it'll do it sustained.
It might just keep it from dying nearly as fast.
Power brick for this laptop is freaking 250 watts.
I am quite disconcerted
that this network adapter is not showing up though.
Oh, I see what you mean.
Here, Brandon, check this out.
Boy, the way this is labeled is not great.
Oh my God.
Who is this?
I love his bow tie.
That is amazing.
Good, this is working.
Thank you.
Okay.
That's super cool.
If you don't have Thunderbolt,
it'll operate as a regular USB hub.
Let's go ahead and plug into the right port.
There's my Ethernet controller.
Better make sure you plug into the right port,
ladies and gentlemen.
You're not gonna be doing two and a half gig
over your USB Type-C
on top of everything else you got going on.
And that, ladies and gentlemen,
is why you want two and a half gig Ethernet.
That is literally two and a half times the speed
that you would get with gigabit.
You know what the craziest part is?
Is there are actually consumer applications
for two and a half gig now on the internet.
Like aside from just video editing,
which has been one of our big concerns
over the last, well, you know, 10 years.
Steam games, for example.
If you have enough CPU horsepower,
you can actually download games
in excess of 250 megabytes a second.
Let's download a game.
Are we managing to drain the battery?
We are.
One minute to full charge.
Cause we're using up 40% of the CPU to download a game.
I love it.
Man, I think this SSD might be kind of weak.
Ooh, okay, I saw it spike to 100% usage there.
What are you doing, buddy?
SSD's at 100%.
Oh, that's more like it.
Oh, CPU usage is at 80%.
Oh man, yeah, we just, we don't have the horses.
All right, well, maybe not on a laptop.
Oh, it's an 11900H though.
If you had a faster laptop, it's actually possible
you could crack 100 megabytes a second downloading games.
So there's a use for two and a half gig.
Of course the TS4, which I will be taking home.
Do they know that already?
Yeah, I'm gonna be using this for my personal rig now.
This thing is so nice, man.
Having all this IO on the front now, everything.
I've been using a Razer dock for a while
that has the computer connection on the front
instead of on the back, which bless their hearts,
in my opinion, is not the best way to do that.
So having that back around to the back
for cleaner cable management,
and then having all the ports that I will need on the front,
that's the way I wanna be.
But the TS4 is not the only one
that I'm gonna be talking about today.
There's also the Thunderbolt 4 slash USB 4 element hub.
This bad boy is just eight ports,
but it can do an 8K display.
It's much smaller and it can still do
that crazy power delivery to a connected laptop.
That's why it still comes with a chungus brick.
That's like bigger than the dock itself.
Because you won't have so many devices connected to it,
this brick is only 150 Watts instead of 230
for the full fat TS4.
But that is plenty for strong power delivery
to your computer and
three Thunderbolt 3 ports.
There's your power in.
Four USB type A's.
And then of course the Thunderbolt connection
to your computer.
That's actually super flexible
because these are all Thunderbolt.
I mean, don't kid yourself.
You're not gonna be getting,
Oh, well I've got a 40 gigabit connection here.
And then these are all Thunderbolt.
So it's 40 plus 40 plus 40.
I have 120 gigabit to connected devices.
It just means that you get the capabilities
of Thunderbolt ports.
So that means that you can easily convert them
to DisplayPort.
You can easily break them out
into additional Thunderbolt devices
rather than being limited to just USB devices
over a type C connection.
And because it's Thunderbolt,
you can plug them into USB-C devices
that are not Thunderbolt
because Thunderbolt 4 is also USB-C capable.
Let's have a look at what the cable management situation
might look like for this boy.
Probably go on the other side for this one.
And just like that,
all the high-speed connectivity
that you are likely to need.
The TS4 is like the deluxe one.
This is the elemental one.
That's why it's called the element hub.
It's a little smaller, right?
Definitely more totable.
Man, I wonder if the element hub can do anything
without external power.
Now I'm curious.
I kind of doubt it.
The answer is no,
but that shouldn't come as a surprise.
Thunderbolt 4 is cutting edge.
If you're going to have this number of devices
connected to it,
obviously it's going to need external power.
Neither of these come cheap.
The element is 250 bucks,
but it's nice and compact and totable.
Whereas the TS4 is 380.
Pricey, but man, it's never cool.
And you can check them out at the links down below.
Thanks, CalDigit for sponsoring this video.
You for watching.
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