Gadgetory

the tf3 light from Cal visit is one of the first Thunderbolt 3 docks on the market allowing you to break free from your jungle bondage promising a single cable solution to easily transform your laptop into a workstation something we do at our office all the time without sacrificing one of your highly coveted Thunderbolt 3 ports but can it deliver on these promises and at $200 could it possibly be worth it let's find out shall we the master keys pro keyboard lineup from Coolermaster is available in three sizes each in white or RGB flavours check them out at the link below the relentless onward march of technology can sometimes leave us stranded with legacy gadgets the tf3 Lite attempt to both solve the problem of adapting a newer physical USB standard to your older devices and thanks to Thunderbolt restore the port's that we've given up for the sake of thinner and lighter devices without compromising performance so it's equipped with one USB type-c and to Taipei's a Gigabit Ethernet port audio out and in and one DisplayPort 1.2 port of course it also sports two Thunderbolt three ports though it should be noted that one of them will always be occupied it's used to connect the device to your Windows or Mac PC with no manual driver installation required that's a fair bit of IO by today's standards but is it enough to let you ditch your dongles I guess that depends on your needs really let's start with the good things the USB ports all operate at the USB 3.1 gen2 on five gigabit per second transfer speed so we saw real-world speeds of 300 to 350 megabytes per second on our angel bird SSDs ample for a modern external single SSD but it should be noted that if you were to use a high-end external drive that relies on raid for increased speeds over USB 3 10 gigabit you may experience some bottlenecking on these ports the good news though is that the Thunderbolt 3 port silly is a very cool connector can operate at USB 310 gig as long as you don't need it for additional Thunderbolt devices or a second DisplayPort monitor now on to the mediocre it only has two type-a ports a number easily eaten up by a keyboard and mouse unless you want to dongle your dongle it also lacks an SD card reader and we're on to the sub mediocre now the audio ports are nice to have but they should really be on the front in my opinion and they introduced an impermissible which is a no-go for anyone who wants to listen to music at low volume but hold on a minute that dongle roundup you did recently had what seemed to be some much cheaper solutions that offered pretty similar functionalities some of them even had SD ports so why should I spend more than 70 bucks well the answer is that as great as this thing is it's not Thunderbolt 3 compliant and that means no DisplayPort so it's not capable of driving a 5k monitor or dual 4k monitors and in fact is even limited to 30 Hertz operation for a single 4k monitor the ts3 Lite handles all of these scenarios at 60 Hertz as long as your OCD can handle potentially needing two different cable types in order to achieve it and what about that extra Thunderbolt 3 port does that make the TF three light worth the price of admission well maybe but I would make the argument that it's most valuable if your machine only has one Thunderbolt 3 port being able to daisy chain up to six Thunderbolt devices gives you a lot of groovy options though this does fall apart a little when you consider that most devices with only one Thunderbolt 3 port also have other i/o decreasing the need for the TF 3 lights other ports and I mean let's say your machine does have multiple Thunderbolt 3 ports like the 2016 MacBook Pro well then you could easily just plug in a dongle for your peripherals and a second cable for your monitor when you sit down so maybe then the best argument to be made for the TF 3 light is that it's a 1 cable solution being able to take your laptop around the office for meetings then plunk it down quickly at your desk that's great except it's not quite all kitty cats and tacos in this area either you still have to plug in your wall charger because even though the tf3 light comes with a honkin power brick it only pushes 15 watts over the type-c connector enough to charge your phone and probably operate your computer but not enough to charge your computer this is especially a drag if you have a monitor that will charge your macbook through its USB type-c port like LG's ultra fine 5k or 4k 27 UD 88 because you'll actually lose that capability if you're running through the dock which come to think of it some of these monitors actually have a decent amount of their own i/o so maybe a USB type-c monitor with a dongle hanging off the back of it is a better one cord solution right now though with that said Cal digit does have an upcoming non lite version that will charge your machine if you're not ready to invest in a new monitor so we want to hear about it in the comments what is your setup like is USBC enough for you is Thunderbolt a cool solution looking for a problem or are you already on your way to Amazon to buy a ts3 light right now let us know so thanks for watching guys if you disliked the video hit the dislike button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our community forum which you should totally join and our merch store reads buy cool shirts just like this one