The secret caveats of the CalDigit TS3 Plus dock
First thing’s first. CalDigit support reps are responsive, friendly, and capable. CalDigit’s doing something right in the support department and other peripheral makers would do well to follow CalDigit’s example. I really wish all email support was as straightforward, helpful and reasonable as CalDigit’s.
Editor warning: rant follows.
Unfortunately, after one (fast) RMA and countless reconfigurations in an attempt to solve the issue, I’m sorry to say that there are unspoken but real limitations of their TS3 Plus Thunderbolt 3 dock that you should consider before buying, and which they (so far) have not acknowledged in most/all/any of their marketing materials or webpages.
Let’s start with a look at the ports on the device:
The USB ports are split between two controllers: one Fresco Logic controller (for most of the 5 Gbps ports), and an ASMedia controller (for the 10Gbps port and one or two of the 5 Gbps ports). In total, CalDigit advertises 15 usable ports across USB, Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, Ethernet, optical audio, analog audio, and an SD card reader. Yes, they count the SD card reader and audio jacks as ports. Regardless, this number is a lie — the total number of usable ports is far fewer — which leads to the first major caveat of this device.
1 Don’t expect to fill all the USB ports on the back without something going horribly, terribly wrong. Every time I tried to use most of the ports I paid for, even with a relatively mundane set of equipment (keyboard, mouse, webcam, headset, YubiKey, and card reader), some of the USB devices intermittently failed, threw errors, boot-looped or simply stopped responding. I fully expected to use all the ports on the back — in fact, that was a key reason I bought the shiny expensive thing — so as you can imagine, this problem took the jam right out of my doughnut. This problem gets much worse if you happen to have any USB devices that are high-bandwidth or simply high-power. Devices like RGB mice and keyboards, high-end webcams, and Elgato StreamDecks can end up limiting the number of usable ports even further. In my testing, I didn’t even need to use the ports on the front to summon the USB-pocalypse, but if you want to use the two ports on the front, I suggest to leave an equivalent number empty on the back. Sad, but there’s more:
2 Don’t expect to run any USB hubs behind any of the USB ports on this dock whatsoever, including the 10Gbps USB-C port, which, technically, should have more than enough bandwidth to run a simple USB hub, especially if the USB hub has its own power brick. You might get lucky with a very specific set of peripherals, but it’s far more likely that even a separately powered USB hub will starve for resources and suffer intermittent failures, even if the downstream hub is only powering wimpy devices like wireless mouse dongles. You might not have this problem if you plug the hub into the dock’s extra Thunderbolt port, but then you wouldn’t be able to run it to a monitor or other Thunderbolt device out of it, which probably defeats the main purpose of buying a Thunderbolt dock in the first place. Next:
3USB 3.0 webcams, especially high-end, 4K capable jobs like the Logitech Brio and the new Cisco WebEx Desk Camera, are virtually incompatible with the dock, especially if you attempt to use any of the ASMedia USB ports (the Fresco Logic USB ports seem to be much more reliable). CalDigit provides some drivers for folks who are having issues using webcams with this dock, but I’ll save you some time: they don’t help. In fact, they actually further impaired the camera operation, because after installing them, Windows Hello stopped working. Charming.
4 The digital optical audio output doesn’t support any sort of volume control, so if you plan to use it, you’ll need to control the volume entirely via the amp, and not from your computer. Compare that with almost all the Realtek onboard audio modules released (since, roughly, 2010) that do, and this is just a disappointing cost-cutting measure on CalDigit’s part. CalDigit should have spec’d a module that supported volume control over optical out especially at this device’s price.
Overall, I disappointed with this dock for the price, and I look forward to the next generation — of Thunderbolt 4 hubs and, hopefully, better experiences.
Bonus!
5 Unlike the other caveats, this one IS mentioned in their sales collateral: That 10Gbps USB-C port doesn’t support DisplayPort alternate mode, so forget using it with any USB-C monitors or drawing tablets. I knew this going in, but what a shame.
