edit: I have potentially answered some of my own questions here, see the first comment.
I’ve been working almost 100% from home lately and I’d like to clean up my desk setup. I use the same desk/monitors for private use and work, so I’m thinking about getting a good docking station so I only have one cable running along my desk, and not power, HDMI and a few USB cables.
I’ve heard Wendell recommend OWC. The OWC thunderbolt hub seems to be what I need and is priced appropriately, if the quality is there, while the OWC thunderbolt docks might be overkill for me.
Am I correct that I can just use two of the back thunderbolt ports for display (since I have two 1440p displays at my desk, ideally running at 120+Hz but I’ll live with 60Hz if that’s a limitation) with normal USB-C to HDMI cables? That would leave me with a third thunderbolt port on the back of the thunderbolt hub, which I’d plug a cheap USB hub into for extra USB-A ports. That’s my main use case with my work laptop, a recent Dell Latitude 5540 with Thunderbolt ports.
If all of that works fine I’d also have a secondary use case, plugging my Steamdeck OLED or my Samsung Galaxy S23/Galaxy Tab S9 into the thunderbolt hub. None of these devices are thunderbolt devices, so AFAIK the thunderbolt hub will fall back to USB-C specs and work as a USB-C docking station. How does it handle DP alt mode or HDMI alt mode in that case? Both the Steamdeck and the Samsung devices support DP alt mode and HDMI alt mode as far as I know, since you can directly plug into a DP or HDMI Monitor/TV with them or use a usb-c docking station to connect multiple displays, but how does that work in combination with the thunderbolt hub when it falls back to usb-c specs?
Or am I overcomplicating things and a “normal” usb-c docking station, with DP and HDMI ports on the back, would be better suited for my use case? If that is the case, what are some reputable brands/models out there?
I have potentially found an answer to some of my questions. https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/rdqd4l/thunderbolt_4_dock_for_usbc_only_laptop/
According to this thread, the owc thunderbolt dock (and I’m assuming also the hub) will only output to 1 display when it is running purely in usb-c mode. Multimonitor support via TB relies on the host pc having thunderbolt. So a “pure” thunderbolt dock might not be what I’m looking for, since I’m not even using many TB features, all my new work laptops just happen to support thunderbolt.
From what I read, you can have either 2 datalanes or all 4 datalanes allocated to DP alt mode (seems they all use dp alt mode and just convert it to hdmi if there is an hdmi port) via usb-c, when using all 4 lanes you are limited to low speed USB 2.0 over the same usb-c cable. Splitting that DP alt mode signal into multiple display signals is then handled by MST. So I’m assuming I want an MST capable usb-c dock with at least 2 DP/HDMI outputs that is either hardwired, or dynamically switches to, 4 lane DP alt mode to get the highest possible refreshrate and resolution support on the widest range of devices.
People were also talking about “dual sst” in that thread, which I’m not finding any references for. Is dual sst just another way of saying mst?
I have some experience with DP alt mode and thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is way better so i would use that with your computer, and then fall back on a USB-C alt mode for the steam-deck with a single screen.
DP alt mode has some weird limitations with bandwidth over lanes, where you can’t leftover bandwidth of 2 lanes for a different display. Where thunderbolt will have a better distribution of bandwidth. I’m currently running a very cheap elgato TB2 dock with 1gbe, usb 3, 1 3440x1440@75 and 1 2560x2880@60 display.
If you use a usb-c dock with alternate mode you will only have 2 DP lanes for each display and then have USB2.0 for the rest combined.
If you’re trying to do Samsung Dex mode, make sure the dock fully supports it.
Look at the specs of the USB-C fallback mode on TB docks, some docks may only do a single 2K/4K at 60/120Hz and the other two displays are capped at 30Hz. There are docks that only do 120Hz on the HDMI port.