Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma review: A flashy dock with drawbacks

Price When Reviewed

$399.99

Best Prices Today: Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma

Does Razer’s Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma provide the same fun RGB sparkle as its predecessor? It does indeed. But serious, cutthroat competition delivers the basics for much less–and some fairly severe issues should give you pause.

Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma: Configurations

Razer’s Thunderbolt 5 Dock ships in two variants: the RGB-equipped “Chroma” version and the “Mercury” option. The Mercury option is plain white and (at press time) costs $389.99 — basically, it’s an aesthetic difference for those who want more vanilla setups. Razer representatives assured me that there would be no functional difference between the two. The only difference is the lack of RGB lighting.

Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma: Design, ports, installation process

Razer’s Thunderbolt 5 dock is an 11-in-1 dock, consisting of three Thunderbolt 5 outputs and one Thunderbolt 5 connection to your laptop. Like others in this Thunderbolt 5 dock generation, Razer has chosen to allow you to buy the necessary cables to connect them to external displays. Depending upon your monitor, you’ll need either USB-C (Thunderbolt) cables capable of the 80Gbps/120Gbps connection that Thunderbolt 5 allows, or else buy the high-speed cables that terminate in a DisplayPort or HDMI connector. (The Thunderbolt 5 connections support DisplayPort 2.1.)

Beyond the Thunderbolt 5 ports, the dock includes two 10Gbps USB-C ports, one 10Gbps USB-A port, Gigabit Ethernet, a 3.5mm headphone jack, plus a UHS-II SD slot on the side. A 0.8 meter (31-inch) Thunderbolt 5 cable connects to your laptop.

If you’re looking for a slick addition to your PC battlestation, Razer’s Thunderbolt 5 dock will serve. But with some severe faults, most shoppers should look for alternatives.

If you’re someone who does like a bit of color on your desktop, however, the Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma is an ideal choice. Razer’s dock includes an RGB strip that runs along the underside of the dock, accenting all surfaces except the top and the rear ports. That’s a bit ironic since the rear ports (especially the Thunderbolt 5 connections) are embossed with black-on-black labels, so that I really had to squint (and use a small flashlight) to make out which ports were which.

While Microsoft has promised that you’ll be able to manage your PC’s RGB lighting using its Windows 11 Settings, Razer’s Blade 18 laptop — my test bed — includes an app called Synapse which controls the lighting on the Blade as well as peripherals like the Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma.

The Synapse app is powerful and versatile, and it allows me to configure the dock’s RGB settings from a “Starlight” twinkle to a “Breathing” pulse to waves of color to just a static glow. The last option is the least distracting. Incidentally, Razer also patched out the major RGB vulnerability that exists in most RGB and fan drivers.

Otherwise, the Razer Thunderbolt 5 dock is an upgrade over the similar Thunderbolt 4 Dock Chroma, a very good dock priced at $329.99 at press time. Unless you wish to future-proof your desktop, you’re better off buying the older TB4 dock to save a bit of money while still keeping that RGB rizz, as the kids say. A Thunderbolt 5 dock will work with a PC with only Thunderbolt 4 docking ports, but you’ll lose out on the higher-speed Thunderbolt 5 interface that allows for three 4K displays at 144Hz, eGPU capabilities, and more. On the other hand, if you don’t have such a setup, an older TB4 dock is still an option.

In addition to the functional differences between the two, however, the two docks are designed differently. The older Thunderbolt 4 dock includes ports on the front and back, while Razer’s designers chose to engineer its latest dock with every single port (save the SD slot) on the rear of the dock. It makes for a nice clean look, if that’s your thing. Otherwise, the dock is made out of anodized aluminum, giving it a bit of a plasticky feel. All told, the dock measures 8.1 x 3.3 by 1.2 inches and weighs 1.15 pounds.

There are no “dedicated” charging ports, though the Thunderbolt port supplies 15W (or an actual load of 13.7W, according to my power meter). Dock makers used to advertise a port or two as a “charging port.” That’s been quietly dropped as a feature from most dock makers as the power input that modern smartphones require to fast charge has hit 40W and above.

You will see small venting on the short sides, however, since Razer also included an active fan that can kick on under load. Don’t expect to hear it while tapping away on an office document, however. The very quiet fan only turns on during heavier workloads and the dock remained quite cool throughout.

I didn’t notice any issues with any of the ports, the SD card slot, or the headphone jack.

Razer’s dock also ships with an M.2 SSD slot, which doesn’t come populated with an SSD like the Sonnet Echo 13. That allows you to add storage directly to the dock rather than use an external SSD. (Is this necessary? I’ll address this in the performance section, below.)

Adding an SSD could hardly be simpler. Underneath the dock is a plastic cover, which pops off easily but otherwise keeps the SSD secure and apparently free from dust. Attaching the SSD takes a second or two simply to slide into the connector sleeve. You might expect a screw to secure it in place. Instead, the SSD includes a circular notch, which fits over a small cylinder with a small latching mechanism, like the hands of a clock. Simply turn the cylinder a half turn or so to lock the SSD in place.

You’ll then need to use the Windows disk management system to format the SSD, which also takes a few seconds.

My only problem is that after I successfully inserted the SSD, re-latched the cover, tested it, and attempted to remove the cover for a photo… I couldn’t. Right now, my test SSD is stuck inside Razer’s dock until I force it open or it manages to wiggle free. Big problem!

Is the Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma one of the best Thunderbolt docks? Let’s find out.

Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma: Power issues

Razer’s Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma performed adequately, although not in one scenario. Razer’s Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma demonstrated instability within minutes of connecting it to my test PC, the Razer-manufactured Blade 18. I could excuse some flickering when the dock was first plugged in, but it spontaneously disconnected the displays before reconnecting them a short time later. Within a few minutes, Razer’s dock had disconnected again. It continued to show signs of instability.

In this case, there was an excuse: I was accidentally powering the laptop on battery power. The dock supplies only 140W of power to the laptop, not the full rated 240W that the Thunderbolt 5 spec allows for. That’s not unusual, as the other Thunderbolt 5 docks I’ve tested only supported 140W as well. I don’t usually test a dock’s performance on battery power, but it was worth noting that a typical Thunderbolt 4 dock supplies enough power (60 to 90W, on average) to satisfy the needs of the typical business notebook with a Thunderbolt 4 port. Thunderbolt 5 is typically confined to gaming laptops, which can demand up to 400W under load.

I didn’t initially mark down the Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma because of this, as it’s an unusual scenario.

The question, however, is whether the dock displayed any instability while the laptop was connected to power. It did not, but there was a lot of display “panic” when the laptop and dock resumed from sleep: docks turning on and off for several seconds when the laptop resumed from sleep. I saw more of this behavior than on other Thunderbolt 5 docks I’ve tested on the same laptop. Otherwise, the dock’s stability earned a passing grade but that’s all.

I’m more concerned about the power delivery to the laptop.

Under normal tests, the Razer dock transferred about 85W to the Razer laptop — nothing wrong there. But then I decided to play a PC game to see how much the laptop would draw from the dock. I unplugged the laptop from its power cable and used the dock itself as its only power source.

My power meter instantly showed that the power supplied dropped to zero, occasionally spiking to 85W or so again, then dropping off to zero for seconds at a time. A second battery meter reported similar results. The laptop never received 140W, however, which is what the dock is rated for. Windows, of course, complained about a lack of available power.

I recorded what I saw and supplied it to Razer, which didn’t deliver an explanation by press time, more than ten days after we contacted them for comment. After the publication of this review, Razer reported that it had reproduced the results of my testing and was investigating the issue.

Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma: Performance

The dock’s performance was a little slower than its competition. The streaming performance was perfectly fine; the dock dropped 11 frames on one display and 15 frames (out of 10,000) on the other display while streaming a pair of 4K videos at 60Hz. Again, this metric was quite good.

When transferring data via an attached Thunderbolt 5 SSD, the Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma and the SSD reported 396.5MB/s under the PCMark storage test, for a score of 2,654. That’s less than the Sonnet Echo 13 (436MB/s) or the Plugable TBT-UDT3 (437MB/s). While streaming in the background, the performance dropped to 365.1MB/s, versus 402MB/s for the Plugable dock. That’s probably not something that you’ll feel in real-world applications, but it’s still a tad slower.

Copying a basket of more than 30GB of video and other files from the SSD through the dock to the desktop took 18.6 seconds, or 19.3 seconds while streaming. Again, that’s about two seconds slower than the competition.

I also tested the dock using a 2TB Crucial P310, a PCIe 4 SSD. Here the dock showed its worth: 423.08MB/s from the internal SSD using PCMark’s tests, with a slight drop to 415.09 MB/s while streaming. The folder copy completed in a blistering 16.08 seconds, or 18 seconds while streaming. The basic PCMark score increased just 7 percent from using an external PCIe 5 SSD to a slightly slower (and cheaper) PCIe 4 M.2 SSD.

By comparison, that’s much faster than Sonnet’s internal SSD, which delivered data at 279.8MB/s, a 51 percent increase. Clearly, the interface as well as the speed of the SSD matters, but that’s performance to think about, too. For gamers, a high-speed external SSD makes a difference, and it’s a positive mark for Razer’s dock.

Razer Thunderbolt 5 Dock Chroma: Conclusion

I wouldn’t, and that’s not entirely Razer’s fault. Most of it is, however.

In the middle of this review, Intel — whose chips power about 80 percent of the laptop market — revealed that its 2026 laptop platform, the Core Ultra Series 3 or “Panther Lake” — will only support Thunderbolt 4 natively, or Thunderbolt 5 with the addition of a separate, discrete chip. That tells me that most 2026 laptops will support Thunderbolt 4 instead, not 5. That’s a strike against this dock.

Thunderbolt 5, then, will be reserved for gaming laptops. But Razer markets itself as “for gamers.” If that’s the case, I expect the dock would work acceptably under a gaming scenario, which it didn’t. Somewhere along the line — between the combination of Razer’s test laptop and its dock — the power delivery didn’t, well, deliver.

I did like this dock under normal operation. It performed perfectly acceptably, and aside from clearer labels for the ports, was a solid dock. Adding an M.2 slot is a nice touch… but if you can’t get the SSD free for a future upgrade, what good is it?

With all that said, I would consider alternatives. Plugable’s 11-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 (TBT-UDT3) docking station is functionally identical to Razer’s dock (again, without RGB), is priced $100 less, and runs a bit faster. We’ve reviewed a handful of Thunderbolt 5 docks as part of our recommendations for the best Thunderbolt docks, and our roundup is a good place to start.

I thought Razer’s Thunderbolt 4 Dock Chroma was surprisingly good! But this Thunderbolt 5 update falls short between its power instability, high price, and unclear labeling.

This review was updated at 9:20 AM on Oct. 30, with Razer’s confirmation that the company was able to reproduce the power delivery issue that PCWorld’s testing turned up.