I have the the TBT4-UDZ TB4 Docking Station and find it very capable, however, it’s taken me months to get it operating flawlessly … I think I’m finally there now. I’ve paired it with my ASUS GU603HM ROG laptop which is an i9 with 40gb RAM and a good TB4 port. Thanks to Bob who helped me iron out many of these issues. Here are my Lessons Learned:
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The Realtek USB Internet driver MUST be updated as listed in some of the Plugable blogs, otherwise the network will randomly disconnect.
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The USB cable provided with the dock was not adequate. Occasionally various USB devices would not enumerate, e.g. my SteelSeries keyboard. There were not enough ports on the dock alone, so I am using a 9 port powered USB hub connected to one of the dock’s ports to get more capacity. This probably didn’t help, but it’s what I needed. And occasionally the display would not be recognized without some fiddling. I swapped in a higher quality, higher capacity USB-C cable and the enumeration issues were minimized. Believe it or not, in this case, the cable DOES make a difference. You are trying to get up to 40gb/sec across this cable plus USB-C PD 100 Watts and it has to be a good one!
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Speaking od PD, the TBT4-UDZ can supply only 100 watts through the TB4 port, which is enough for most laptops. Mine has an integrated NVidia RTX3060 gpu and it’s an i9, so in some modes 100W is not enough. I was getting intermittent Windows Code 41 power failure codes until I reverted to the 240W barrel connector PSU that comes with the laptop. This Plugable dock supports USB-PD 3.0 up to 100W using 20V and 5 amps. My laptop is only a PD 3.0 TB4, so even if the dock was PD 3.1 (up to 48V 240W), my laptop could not accept it. Going forward, Plugable should consider new designs that support PD 3.1 up to 240W (48V 5A) since laptops are becoming more capable all the time. Granted, that unit would be priced accordingly.
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Hotplugging the TB4 port … I strongly discourage anyone using this dock to hotplug the TB4 port. I was getting occasional Windows 11 corruptions and reinstalled Windows a couple times until I figured this out. Hotplugging the TBT4-UDZ dock with my ASUS GU603HM laptop corrupts the registry hive almost every time. I learned how to rebuild the hive without reinstalling Windows and then observed the corruption happened again upon a hotplug of the TB4 port. My advice … JUST SAY NO to hotplugging the TB4. I’ve seen some posts that suggest it needs to be done. If you do, make sure you know how to recover from it.
I hope these lessons learned are helpful to others, and thanks again, Bob for the help you provided.
Happy Holidays!
Steve C.