Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock review

Thunderbolt 5 is a powerful interface. It's also an expensive one. Available only on the latest devices, and with limited availability today, it took me a while for one to land on my lap. When one did, with the Alienware 15 Area-51, I began my search for a hub that might let me take advantage of its high-speed capabilities. As I discovered, a Thunderbolt 5 hub runs anywhere from expensive to 'good lord, they can't be serious, can they?'

The Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma I'm looking at today is more the latter at $400/£400. But do cheaper Thunderbolt 5 hubs come with RGB lighting? They do not—at least most I've seen.

The Thunderbolt 5 Dock offers a range of ports to those willing to drop that sort of moolah on the thing: 3x Thunderbolt 5 (downstream), 1x Thunderbolt 5 (upstream; for the connection to your PC, with 140 W power delivery), 1 Gb ethernet, 2x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen2, 1x USB Type-C 3.2 Gen2, an SD card slot, and a microphone/headphone combo port.

Thunderbolt 5 supports PCIe 4.0, DisplayPort 2.1 and USB4 standards for a properly universal dock over a few of those connections. It's also a pretty slim device for all its features; at 207 x 85 x 31 mm. The 250 W power brick provided, however, is huge. More or less a match for the Dock itself—seriously.

The Thunderbolt 5 ports are rated to 80 Gbps for data as a baseline. Though it can boost to the maximum available bandwidth of 120 Gbps if you're using it for display/video. I've read up on this feature, called Bandwidth Boost, and it basically redistributes the available bandwidth based on demand. So, if you think of the overall bandwidth both ways along a Thunderbolt 5 connection as 160 Gbps, by default, a Thunderbolt 5 connection operates at 80 Gbps both ways (transmit and receive); if heavy display/video traffic is detected, it flips to an asymmetric mode with 120 Gbps transmit and only 40 Gbps receive.

For the most part, there's no need to think much about what's going on. The ports are blisteringly quick and, when display output works (which isn't always straightforward, depending on your monitor—my older Gigabyte monitor doesn't much like it), it can handle a lot of traffic all at once.

Flipping the dock over exposes another handy feature: an M.2 SSD slot. This supports PCIe 4.0 x4 and up to 8 TB of storage capacity. I've tested it with the Solidigm P44 Pro, which runs up to 6,500 MB/s seq. write, and it manages to shift the 147 GB heft of the Baldur's Gate 3 installation files to the Alienware in 2:38.

You might assume, like I did, that this product was released to pair nicely with a Razer Blade laptop. A way to get your gaming laptop hooked into a full ecosystem of peripherals for a better desktop setup. Only one problem: Razer switched to AMD processors for its latest Blade 14 and Blade 16 laptops (and rightly so, in my opinion) but Thunderbolt 5 is exclusive to Intel's latest chips (though TB4 is supported by Apple). At least the Razer Blade 18 offers an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 chip with Thunderbolt 5 support.

The Dock works just fine over a USB4 connection, at least, so those other laptops aren't out of the question here. USB4 is slower than Thunderbolt, usually around 40 Gbps, and the knock-on effect of that is the dock has to share that limited bandwidth across all of its ports. Though, generally, unless it is slammed with traffic from display and large file transfers, the slowdown isn't particularly noticeable. In my testing, with little else going on with the Dock, I noticed no slowdown whatsoever when transferring Baldur's Gate 3 over a USB4 connection compared to Thunderbolt 5.

That said, anything lower than USB4 presented some issues. Understandably so; Razer doesn't cite support for older USB ports in official documentation, but I gave it a go anyway. While some functionality is retained, any NVMe drive in the Dock fails to show up on a USB 3.2-connected system. That's no big surprise: USB4 introduced PCIe tunneling to support external NVMe drives or GPUs.

The moral of the story: if you're spending this sort of money on a Thunderbolt dock, you best be properly equipped to use it.

The Dock can be pretty noisy in operation. It's actively cooled—a grandiose way of saying it has a fan—and you can really hear it whizzing around throughout the day. There are small intake/exhaust vents on either side of the Dock. It tends to run the fans a lot; most of the time, in fact. So if you're particularly sensitive to fan noise, you might want to move it as far away as possible.

The only issue here is that the included cable, while notably of high quality, is only 80 cm long. If you want to go any longer, the Thunderbolt 5 spec covers cables up to 2 metres in length—and any long cables will cost you a pretty penny. That's an issue I've run into since setting it up, as I have a standing desk, I need to run a longer cable. I've picked up a 3-metre cable that seemingly works just fine for USB4 connectivity, but that might not always be the case, especially if you're planning to use the Dock's many ports all-at-once.

Altogether it's a set-up that will set you back a lot of money. The Dock itself at $400/£400, an NVMe SSD, perhaps a longer cable… it all adds up to near-enough the price of a mid-range graphics card. So it's not an easy recommendation to make for a lot of people. If you only wish to bump the number of ports available to you on your desktop, there are much more affordable options with worse capabilities. Some of the USB hubs on Amazon are a bit slapdash but you could buy a high-end USB hub for a fraction of the cost of a Thunderbolt 5 hub.

Similarly, you can buy a heavy-duty Thunderbolt 5 hub for the same price as this. The CalDigit TS5 Plus offers much of what Razer is here, with the added benefit of dedicated audio jacks, DisplayPort, more Type-A ports and a MicroSD slot. It's nowhere near as sleek and there's no onboard storage, but it's more capable in other ways. It offers front-facing ports, which Razer's Dock does not—you have to awkwardly fiddle with ports to connect things or pick it up to get a better view.

The Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock, then, offers a decent upgrade for anyone with a need for especially speedy ports—with the added benefit of space for an M.2 SSD and Synapse-controlled RGB lighting, if you're into that sort of thing. It has stiff competition, however, and alternative options that I'd likely end up choosing myself, which, combined with the high price tag and fan noise, just keep it at arm's length.