New TBT3-UDZ - Issues

New Plugable dock user but experienced IT guy. I am coming from using an Anker ethernet/hdmi/usb-c dongle that has never exhibited any of the symptoms I am seeing.

My laptop is an HP Envy X360 with Ryzen 4700U chip, so I am using a USB-C connection. My issues are…

  • my external HDMI connect monitor (LG 32" 2560x1440) does not remain connected when plugged into the Display 1 port. It randomly disconnects and goes black. I get a “beep” notification when this happens and I have to power cycle the monitor to get it to display an image again. This does not happen when it is plugged into Display 2 port.

  • the ethernet port does not always stay at gb speed. It will sometimes fall back to 100mb without notice. Sometime this happens after the laptop comes out of sleep mode, sometimes when the computer is first started. Doing a disable/enable cycle for the adapter usually brings back the gb ethernet speed. In case it matters, I am never connected to WiFi at the same time I use the ethernet connection.

  • I have also experienced what appears to be a lock-up of the dock on more than one occasion. I had to power cycle the dock to re-gain communications. The only items plugged into the dock are a transmitter for a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse, the Plugable power brick, the usb-c cable (rear panel plug), the HDMI monitor, and ethernet cable.

Do you think I have a defective unit? Or am I missing something in the set up?

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Plugable support! Sorry to hear about this issue. I’d be more than happy to assist you.

The video and lock up issues may be due to the USB-C implementation on this Envy with Ryzen. We’ve seen some other issues with a few Ryzen host systems with our USB-C docks over the past year.

I’d probably recommend as a starting point, make sure your system has the latest UEFI BIOS and any firmware updates from HP. In addition, ensure your graphics card drivers are fully updated. These will be critical for getting the most stability for the video functionality.

For the Ethernet issue, I haven’t encountered this behavior myself, dropping from gigabit down to 100Mbps. It sounds like this might be a driver issue of some sort. You can try loading the optional driver from Realtek to see if this might help: https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/network-interface-controllers-10-100-1000m-gigabit-ethernet-usb-3-0-software

If these suggestions don’t seem to help, we have a troubleshooting tool that helps us find out what is going on in situations like this. Please plug the dock into your computer, then go to this page and follow the instructions there:

http://plugable.com/support/plugdebug

You can reference ticket 326650 when emailing us the results.

Please don’t hesitate to let us know of other questions.

Thanks again for contacting Plugable support and best wishes!

Joshua Henry

Senior Engineer | Product Owner
Plugable Technologies

Thanks for the follow-up Joshua. The bios and graphics card drivers were updated just before I plugged in the dock for the first time. I just re-checked and there is nothing new from HP.

I will try the driver update from Realtek and let you know if it changes the ethernet behavior. I will do some additional testing on the HDMI ports.

If I am still having issues, I will get you the troubleshooting logs. Thanks!

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