I am getting an Oryx Pro from System76 soon. I’m ecstatic and forcing myself to do it. Selling my GPU that is probably invaluable to what I like doing right now in order to force myself to do so and not be stuck on an R7 370 that I like a lot. And because of this, I’m forcing myself back into laptops. Desktop is turned off, bought a thinkpad dock for 10 bucks for my X230T…… But now I’m just enamoured by this dock! Enough so that I will delay my purchase a bit to play with this.
I’m actually sad that my Oryk won’t have a REAL dock with it. It’ll be some donglefuck that I get and it’ll be just horrible and hanging off the side of my desk. Just awful.
The hell happened to undersided docks?
The new T series thinkpads don’t have them, the new probooks don’t have them, the new dells don’t have them (as far as I know). The Thinkpad P51 might have one, but I haven’t seen anything about them.
What the hell happened to Dock connectors? And don’t give me some BS about convenience or it being outdated. The fact that my X230T can be completely wireless aside from the dock, pop it off, throw it in a bag, off I go… THATS AMAZING.
Years ago when I was on my HP NW8000 I regret not looking for a dock. There was a workstation dock that had a massive blower on the back that would pull air through the machine faster than the internal fan could and with that1.67 GHZ Pentium M and a near desktop level 9600 PRO that thing woulda FLEW. I’d never needed to waste so much time with desktop shit I’d just bang the thing into a dock and TADA. I WISH I had realized the flexibility and power of a dock.
Point is… MORE DOCKS. AND NOT A DAMN BOX HANGING OFF THE SIDE.
Never bought a dock for my ThinkPad though they do seem very handy. A few other things I am sad to see go away are the modularity and amazing keyboards. Here is my T420 that I took apart to replace the thermal paste and install a brand new OEM keyboard. Just looking inside you can see these older ThinkPads are built like a tank.
I have a t420 and dock for it, and just saw my favorite thinkpads YouTube channel post up about a thinkpad dock that could support an external GPU way before it’s a thing now.
That said, at work the new refreshes are coming with external dock stations. IMO with usb-c, thunderbolt and such, the externals are going to take over. Smaller form factor, no need for complicated proprietary bottom connecters etc.
Dell still makes a Thunderbolt/USB-C dock, much of the other OEMs(HP, Lenovo & Toshiba) have been rebranding USB 3.0 docks with a similar chipset(s) used by StarTech’s docks.
Main reason docks aren’t done on business machines is USB 3.0/3.1/Thunderbolt has made it easier to build thinner/smaller mobile devices & frees up PCIe lanes for built-in I/O(extra TB3/USB 3.1 ports). Older Thinkpads pre-T430/530 used PCI/PCIe lanes for the extra port replication(USB 2.0/3.0/serial/printer port) & VGA/DVI/DisplayPort was a pass-thru.
During the Core 2 Duo era such as the Thinkpad T60/T61/T400/500 which supported a PCIe(eGPU) dock, the dock connector was 4x PCIe but due to the USB port/serial/parallel combo it only provided 2x PCIe performance at best(PCIe slot powered GPU such as a Radeon 2400-2600 was the realistic max).
As far as my usage of docks my T61 still uses it mainly for the serial/parallel port duty and my T420 uses the dock mainly for cable management purposes.
you could still see gains with propietary cables eg the alien-ware graphics adaptor used a custom pscie extender and it wayyyy out preformed a razer core v1 (pcie gen3 x4) . untill there is also tb4 the bandwidth over tb3 for egpu’s will be shotty due to x4 speeds. the proprietary connectors are currently the good ones. i own a razer core v1 and it has a 15% egpu performance tax on my 1070. the controller for thunderbolt is too slow overall the alienware graphics thing uses direct pcie which saved performance and overhead.
once pcie gen 4 is more common and standard on consumer stuff then tb4 or the like can handle a gen 3 on a gen 4 connection. a gen 4 should in theory be twice as fast so a gen 4 pcie 4 would feel like a gen 3 x8 we will see. but for now if you want the least performance drop the odd connectors with more lanes or direct lanes to the external device is the the current way to go today
