Laptops are great because they allow you to have loads of computer power on the go. But in the last few years, we haven’t gone places a lot. Most of us still have laptops, but they don’t spend much time on our laps or on the road.
Since we are using laptops at our desks more than not why not take advantage of that and plug more stuff in, like a bigger screen, more storage or any sort of bits of bobs you can add to your computer setup to make things easier.
The challenge here is that with most laptops they have limited ports, so limited options of things you can attach at any one time. This is where hubs like the Belkin 14-Port USB-C Docking Station come in.
The first thing that is useful about the Belkin USB-C hub is that it puts out 65w of power, so by plugging in your laptop, depending on what power your laptop needs, the hub could also power your laptop and therefore freeing up another port on the laptop.
This power comes from one of the front USB-C ports, which is well labelled. I like the idea of having all this stuff that you can connect to your laptop with this single cable.
On the front you also have a 10Gbps USB-A and USB-C ports as well as what looks like a headphone jack, but is actually an audio in and out port. So you could connect headphones to here, or a microphone.
On the back, things get pretty busy. You have 2 x USB-A 480Mbps 5V ports. These are slow for data transfer, but good for charging devices. Next those are 2 x USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps ports. These 4 ports look identical, but if you look closely below them here are images/logos that show they are not the same. Probably easiest to remember that the ones right on the end are for power and the ones next to those on the inside for data transfer.
There is a Gigabit Ethernet port, another USB-C 10Gbps port and then the display output ports.
You have 2 x DisplayPort 1.4 and 2 x HDMI 2.0. Now you may think this means you can connect up to four monitors to the dock. Unfortunately that is not the case. You can connect up to three, which is pretty impressive. This will depend on the specs of your laptop and monitors, so please check the spec sheet. But with the right setup you can go up to 3 x 4K monitors.
A word of warning, whilst this dock can work with Macs, Belkin specifically states that it is not recommended for Macs. This particular model is more targeted towards Chromebook users. You can even update the firmware of the dock via a Chromebook.
I appreciate a USB Dock may not be the most exciting thing in your day, but this dock does what it says on the package. It allows you to ad a heap of functionality to your laptop by simply plugging in a single cable. Which is nice.
The Belkin 14-Port USB-C Docking Station has a RRP of $399.95 which isn’t small change, but it does pack a punch.
DRN would like to thank Belkin for supplying the review unit.
Specifications
135W PSU
Connect your laptop to multiple monitors, supports resolution up to 4K
Works With Chromebook
Not recommended for Mac users.
65W Pass-Through USB-C Power Delivery
Ports: 2x HDMI 2.0, 2x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x USB-C (MFDP) port, 5x USB-A, 2x USB-C (1x upstream, 1x downstream), 1x Gigabit Ethernet
3.5mm combination in/out audio jack
Connect up to 3 displays on select Windows host devices with MST capabilities
