I’d much rather have fewer fans in the studio any day. There are no moving parts or fans in the mini Dock so the body of the unit does act as a heat sync and gets a bit hot but again, nothing that I was worried about.

A pair of LG super-wide screens attached to the HDMI ports and I was recording over Dante from the Ethernet connection and all worked fine as I would expect. I had an OWC Envoy Pro NVMe 2TB storage solution attached to the USB-3 port. We all know that a wired internet connection is better than wifi so why not take advantage of the with the built-in Gigabit Ethernet port.Īs you can see from the image above I maxed out the I/O of the mini Dock on a recording session. Devices like tablets often require 2.1A and these will not charge from the mini Dock, however, if you are just using them for data transfer, go right ahead.Īlso, remember that power to the dock will be cut when the Mac or PC is off or goes into sleep or hibernation modes, so don’t expect your phone to be fully charged if the Mac it’s connected to is off or asleep.Īnd if your Mac or PC is running on the battery having these extra devices attached is going to drain your power reserves even faster than normal. There were no visible glitches with the displays even during a fairly heavy Pro Tools recording session.īoth the USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports support bus-powered devices which require up to 900mA, which includes smartwatches and most phones. The two HDMI 2.0 ports are rated up to 4K 60 Hz resolution so I had no issues running my two LG 2560 x 1080 screens from the mini Dock. While the mini Dock “might” work over USB-C is will not officially be supported and will not deliver enough power to the USB ports to charge external devices (more on this later). Remember that while TB-3 and USB-C might look like the same thing there is a vast difference in the specification of these formats, and it’s mainly with regard to power delivery. There are no drivers to install and the mini Dock is fully bus-powered. Just plug the TB-3 cable into a free port on your PC or Mac and off you go. The OWC TB-3 mini Dock is simple to set up and use. And get all those extra connections for $119 USD.

Simply connect the encapsulated Thunderbolt 3 plug to your PC or Mac to give it a Gigabit Ethernet connection via a standard RJ-45 connector, a USB 2.0 port, a USB 3.0 port and two HDMI ports.

The OWC TB3 mini Dock is a 5 in 1 connectivity solution for both the PC or Mac platforms.

Mac mini thunderbolt 3 hub