Header banner
Revain logoHome Page
Bobby Posner photo
1 Level
1335 Review
54 Karma

Review on StarTech.com Triple Monitor USB 3.0 Laptop Docking Station - Enhanced Connectivity for Windows & Mac with 4K HDMI and Dual DisplayPort by Bobby Posner

Revainrating 3 out of 5

DO NOT buy for Mac

Ever since the Mavericks, using all those USB displays has gotten pretty painful. Although the site says Startech, the actual display hardware and software is made by DisplayLink and they are having trouble getting the drivers to work properly. Using the latest driver from their website (2.3) only one monitor worked and the mouse was intermittent and hung a little when moving across the monitor (this is subjective as only 2 of the 4 people I showed noticed this ). The edges of the windows are square, the transparency doesn't work properly, and after an hour of use I noticed that the whole thing appears to be using some form of JPEG compression, so the more windows and things you put on the monitor, the more compression artifacts you see. Visiting websites that use lots of color or animated GIFs really stands out because so much compression is used to drive these USB displays to the point where they're difficult to read. I should also mention that using the flight controls and many other functions either takes a few seconds to respond or just completely ends the user session, throwing you back to the login screen. Very unpleasant. I contacted support through the chat box on their website and the person I worked with was very helpful. I thought maybe I just had a bad one, but these things are all known issues and a rep directed me to their latest beta driver. They just released (15.03.15) it (2.4 Beta 1) which actually allows you to use two monitors at the same time and supposedly fixes some issues but all the transparency, rendering, crashing and compression issues are still there. . They are working on it as far as I can tell but it will take some time. To be clear, ethernet, audio and USB work great, the only issues I have are with the display (that's what I bought it for). None of the Mac Thunderbolt 2 docks actually support dual video, although they usually have both a Thunderbolt and HDMI output, you can only use one at a time (something that isn't really advertised and confuses a lot of people). So my solution for now is to order two Mini DisplayPort to DVI monitor adapters ($7.50 each) and just use them for ethernet, audio and USB. This negates the benefit of only connecting one cable, but first I need something that works. If they ever fix the driver issues, I can always go back and use the MDP-DVI adapters for something else.

Pros
  • Notebook Accessories
Cons
  • I'll write later