- Is he holding balloons?
- Yep.
- Congratulations on whatever you're celebrating!
Sponsored or not,
And this one is sponsored by Cal Digit.
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 four from Cal Digit.
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.
All together, you are looking at a power brick
that is not only large, but also in charge.
Get it? Get it?
In charge?
It's large in charge.
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, four cable.
You can tell, cause it says Thunderbolt four on it.
Not particularly long, but certainly long enough to
plug into the back of the dock, the one labeled computer
right there we go, and connect
to either the right or left side
of your preferred device. 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, mhm, standard C-13 power connector
that goes into it.
Cuz this aint 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 gonna bother my OCD brothers in arms out there
and I'm gonna put it on like this.
- 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.
Oh, that slips a little. Let's try it on a hard surface
instead of an lttstore.com mousepad.
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 adapters 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.
So 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
Cal Digit 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 flippin' 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.
Four Type-A's.
You've got a line in headphone jack, if you don't
like that combo port at the front, another USB-C
but not Thunderbolt this time, and display port 1.4.
So on this bad boy
you can do multiple high resolution displays.
Dual 4k's on Windows and up
to dual 6K displays on Mac. To be clear,
that's not Cal Digits fault, that particular limitation.
It's just because of the way
that Apple implements Thunderbolt systems
kind of a little bit better.
One thing that it's missing is HDMI
but this doesn't bother me because USB-C
or display port 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.
Hm. USB-C to HDMI 2.0, does up to 4k 60 I would think.
So you put that bad boy on there.
Oh. And if you've got dual display port monitors
rather than dual Thunderbolt monitors.
Oh, that's why they've got the two Thunderbolt ports!
Cuz 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 man, display port adapter
then that's how you're gonna run your dual 4k'S.
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.
Dun dun duuun.
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 fricking 250 WATTS.
I am quite disconcerted that
this network adapter is not showing up though.
Oh, I see what you mean.
Yeah, here, Brandon.
Check this out.
Boy, the way this is labeled is not great.
Oh my God.
I love.. who is this?
I love his bow tie.
That is amazing.
Good. This is working.
Thank you.
Okay. Oh, 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.
We're managing to drain the battery.
We are one minute to full charge
cuz 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 a hundred percent usage there.
What are you doing buddy? SSDs at a hundred percent.
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 11 900 H though.
If you had a faster laptop, it's actually possible.
You could crack a hundred 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 do they know that already?
Yes. 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 razor 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 background 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/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 three 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 Thunderbolts,
so it's 40 plus 40 plus 40, ah 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 display port.
You can easily break them out into
additional Thunderbolt devices, rather than
being limited to just USB devices
over a Type-C connection.
Because it's Thunderbolt, you can
plug them into USB-C devices that are not Thunderbolt
because Thunderbolt four 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 tote able.
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 for is cutting edge.
And if you're gonna have this number of devices connected
to it, obviously, it's gonna need external power.
Neither of these come cheap.
The Element is $250
but it's nice and compact and tote able.
Whereas the TS4 is $380, pricey, but man is it ever cool
and you can check them out at the links down below.
Thanks Cal Digit for sponsoring this video,
you for watching,
make sure you get subscribed.