What is going on, everybody?
I am, Mike, welcome back to talk 24/7 TV.
I'm glad that you're with me today because I have got a
problem that I think you can relate to it.
I'm the owner of a new M1 Mac Mini and the problem with the
M1 Mac Mini.
The same goes for the MacBook Pro; it goes
for the iMac.
It goes for all the M1 chips actually,
including the iPad Pro.
Is that they are limited in the number of I/O that you can
connect to this device.
While if you are anything like me, you need several ports
and really the two Thunderbolt ports on those devices just
don't cut it.
In today's video, I will review the Echo 11 Thunderbolt 4 dock
from Sonnet Technologies to tell you if it's worth $319,
they are charging for it.
Let's get started.
Before we get into the review, let's baseline our knowledge on
what the differences are between Thunderbolt 3
and Thermal 4, so we can properly evaluate this dock.
Many think that just because the number is higher,
Thunderbolt 4 is superseding the preceding superseding
Thunderbolt 3, and that is just not the case.
Both Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 are designed and
intended to coexist simultaneously.
There are many similarities between the two.
First, they both use the USB-C connector.
They both have a line bandwidth of 40 gigabits.
They also support PCIe tunneling,
DisplayPort tunneling and have a maximum of six devices that
could be in the Thunderbolt chain.
The cables themselves are interoperable, meaning you
can take a Thunderbolt 4 cable connected to a Thunderbolt 3
device and vice versa, and I get the same throughput and
performance as I would.
The Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 devices can be
mixed and in any order in the chain itself.
It doesn't matter that Thunderbolt three first or
Thunderbolt four first.
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There are some differences in the amount of power you can
charge your upstream computer, like if you're connected to
your Mac, it might only charge 85 watts or 90 watts,
depending on the dock itself.
Even though they are designed to be interoperable and coexist
in a mixed environment, there are some differences.
This is the CalDigit TS3, and this is a Thunderbolt 3
dock with one upstream port connecting to your computer and
then a downstream port in addition to an HDMI or
this case, is a DVI.
Now, both DVI and the downstream Thunderbolt port are
connected to the same Thunderbolt controller.
When we compare that to a Thunderbolt 4 dock with three
downstream interfaces, these interfaces have a shared
PCIe resource, which means it is one of these resources that
could hog all the bandwidth typically for communicating.
It would impact any of the other resources that are
on this device.
That is a little bit different than the Thunderbolt 3 Dock,
where all four PCI lanes are dedicated to the
downstream Thunderbolt port.
Now, let's get a look here at the Echo 11 Thunderbolt
4 dock.
Open this up.
These were kind of hard to find, but I was able to get
my hands on one.
We have a quick start guide.
All right.
We have a very beefy power cable.
With a 0.7-meter Thunderbolt 4 cable.
Here is the AC adapter, and that is it.
So not a whole lot in the box.
Now that's as clear as mud.
Let's talk about the actual interfaces on the Echo
11 Thunderbolt Dock.
Now it's called the Echo 11 because there
are 11 interfaces.
Here the front, there is an SDHC UHS-II card reader.
There's a 1.5 amp fast charger; there's a
3.5mm headphone jack.
You also have the upstream port to charge your Mac or
Windows machine, which delivers 90 watts.
There is a power led and then a link led, which will illuminate
when it's connected to your computer.
And then there's a power button.
The power button is off, which I like because
of my current.
Thunderbolt 4 dock from OWC does not have a power button;
that blue light is always like that.
Now in the back, there's a 20 volt six-point seven-
five AMP charger.
There are three Thunderbolt 3 ports, each capable of
delivering 40 gigabits per second, and they will
provide 15 watts of charging.
There's a gigabit Ethernet port and then three high-speed
USB ports, all capable of delivering 10Gbps
gigs per second.
Now it is an all metal enclosure.
It's got a nice feel to it, and it sounds nice.
It's, you know, it's beefy for the $319 now.
The question you have to ask yourself: "Does it offer
anything significantly different over the OWC
Thunderbolt 4 Dock?" I would say for $279
$50 difference what you're paying for, you know, what is
it?
And in my estimation, there's no difference between
these two docks that warrant the $50.
Maybe you like the metal enclosure.
That's I mean, that could be meaningful.
Maybe you like the button on the dock.
Again, that could be meaningful depending on the type of
environment that you're in.
But I would say that both docks function the same.
Both docks have the same ports,
the same port bandwidth.
I mean, they're almost identical.
And I would think that the same company is designing and
manufacturing these docks for both OWC and Sonnet.
Now, if you're looking to get this dock because you want to
increase the number of displays on your MacBook Pro,
your Mac Mini, your iMac, know that this dock will not
help you with that.
This is only a dock, and it cannot push more than
one display, which is a limit of the graphics card of the GPU
on those devices.
The reason why the Mac Mini supports an additional display
is that there is an HDMI plugged into the back of
the Mac Mini, which is directly connected to the M1
chipset inside of it.
It does not use the GPU, so that is why you can use
two displays here.
Now a couple of things to keep in mind.
If you're looking to connect high bandwidth accessories,
maybe you have a RAID drive, a ten gig thunderbolt drive.
You would not want to use the Thunderbolt 4 dock in these
scenarios because those types of accessories require more
lanes of PCI e than what it has available.
And again, if you connect that to the stock and maybe you had
an external SSD, perhaps you had a RAID drive that you can
do this, they're going to be competing for resources,
and you're going to need a bottleneck.
So that's the thing to keep in mind.
I would still use Thunderbolt three in
that instance because, again,
Thunderbolt three docks like the CalDigit TS3 has four lanes
of PCI dedicated to that downstream Thunderbolt port.
So those are things to keep in mind.
Now I am Mike.
Let me know if you have any questions down in
the comments below.
If you have anything else you'd like me to test.
I'm very active.
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I'll talk to you guys in the next one.