Hyper and J5create show first docking stations with Thunderbolt 5 support

Hyper and J5create introduced the first docking stations with Thunderbolt 5 support at the CES trade fair. This connection standard from Intel offers at least a doubling of bandwidth compared to its predecessor.

Hypers HyperDrive Next Thunderbolt 5 Dock has three Thunderbolt 5 downstream ports. An equal number of 4k-144Hz screens with a downstream bandwidth of up to 120Gbit/s and an upstream of 40Gbit/s can be connected simultaneously. In addition, there are two Thunderbolt 5 ports with a bidirectional bandwidth of 80Gbit/s; Thunderbolt 4 supported a maximum of 40Gbit/s.

An integrated PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot has also been added to connect an SSD, as well as a CFexpress slot and 5Gbit/s network port. The latter is controlled by the new Realtek 5GbE Ethernet controller, which was initially supposed to appear last year. Finally, the dock contains three USB-A connections with 10Gbit/s speeds.

The Thunderbolt 5 8K60 Display Docking Station from J5create also offers three Thunderbolt 5 downstream ports, but only two of them allow you to connect a display. In addition to 4k-144Hz screens, these may also be 8k displays at 60Hz. Furthermore, the network port offers 2.5GbE instead of the 5GbE of Hyper’s dock, and there are two USB-A ports: one with a speed of 5Gbit/s and a 10Gbit/s variant.

Both docking stations have USB Power Delivery up to 140W. Although devices with the Thunderbolt 5 standard can optionally deliver power of up to 240W via the USB EPR specification, neither dock supports this. The HyperDrive Next Thunderbolt 5 Dock will be priced at $400, while J5create’s dock will cost $500. Both docks should appear around summer.

There are currently no laptops on the market with integrated Thunderbolt 5 support. However, the standard is still supported by laptops from some manufacturers by adding the Barlow Ridge controller, which can be incorporated into a separate chip of the laptop processor.