My New Dock

I’ve had a Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express dock on my desk for 5 years or so. I got it with my work Mac, a 2018 MacBook Pro, to enjoy the single-cable docking experience. It’s worked great with my personal Macs as well, providing power, a 60 Hz refresh rate on my 4K display, and enough ports. I never had a reason to replace it until I bought a high-refresh rate monitor capable of 144 Hz. I wanted to get the most out of my new display, at least matching the 120 Hz on my MacBook’s Pro.

The Belkin dock provides a maximum of 95 Hz over its DisplayPort connection, which prompted me to start looking casually at what else was out there. I was aware of some of the docks that had been released over the years, but stayed away due to their high prices (usually around $300) and lack of improvement over what I already had. A high refresh rate was a reasonable justification to at least look. The key to a high refresh rate (I thought) was having an HDMI 2.1 port, which all of the fancy PCs, PlayStations, XBoxes, and TVs have to support their 120 Hz 4K streams. The docks I found that met this criteria were still around $300 and that just wasn’t worth it to me. 

I decided to keep looking casually and, of course, something popped up. It was yet another Black Friday deal, this time on the Anker 778 dock. It was on sale for $136, or 64% off. It supported 100W fast charging for my MacBook Pro, had an HDMI 2.1 port, two DisplayPort ports, four USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, and even Ethernet. It sounded like an amazing find, except that despite having an HDMI 2.1 port, it only listed support for a 60 Hz refresh rate at 8K. I figured that 60 Hz at 8K must also mean 120 Hz at 4K, so I bought it. I’d try it and return it if it didn’t work out. 

Well it turns out that it works exactly as described: 60 Hz at 4K over HDMI 2.1. That’s it. It seemed as if my five year old dock was better than this new fangled device. Before boxing it up and sending it back I decided I’d give the DisplayPort connection a try, assuming that my old cable would only be able to deliver 95 Hz at best. If that worked, it would be worth investing in a new cable just in case DisplayPort was a better option. To my surprise, my five year old DisplayPort cable immediately supported 144 Hz through the dock! What’s interesting is that I can’t select 120 Hz like I can on my Windows machine, but I can select 95 Hz or 60 Hz. I can also select variable refresh rate, which will automatically scale between 48 and 144 Hz depending on the content on the screen. This unfortunately blacks the screen out, which is interesting since variable refresh rate between 48 and 95 Hz works on the Thunderbolt 3 dock. 

I purchased a brand new DisplayPort 1.4 cable to see if it would address the variable refresh rate issue and it did, kind of. I could turn on variable refresh rate but the screen would black out during certain graphics operations like Exposé. Oh well. I’ll take the 144 Hz. I also had to move my laptop to the other side of my desk because the power port is on the opposite side from my Belkin dock. Other than those minor quibbles, the Anker dock is great. It’s small, it supports the high refresh rates I need, it has more USB-A ports than my Belkin dock, and has two USB-C ports in the front. Another win for Black Friday sales.