Hands-on: Kensington’s first Thunderbolt 5 dock is built for the future

Kensington’s first Thunderbolt 5 dock, the future of PC I/O, is here! Unfortunately, it’s just one part of the equation.

The Kensington SD5000T5 EQ Thunderbolt 5 Triple 4K Docking Station is the first Thunderbolt 5 dock I’ve seen inside PCWorld’s lab. Kensington will begin selling the dock today on Amazon for $399.99, a substantial premium to the majority of Thunderbolt 4 docks already on the market. (One exception is Kingston’s SD5800T, a premium Thunderbolt 4 dock).

Thunderbolt 5, however, offers significant advantages compared to Thunderbolt 4 docks, which have offered the same 40Gbps throughput as the older Thunderbolt 3 docks. Thunderbolt 5 boosts that to 80Gbps, and in certain cases even up to 120Gbps in a single direction. That equates to two 8K, 60Hz displays, or three 4K displays at 144Hz. TB5 should also allow laptops to connect to external GPUs, a feature that Thunderbolt 4 passed over, and USB-C charging up to 140W.

The problem is that laptop docking stations like the Kensington SD5000T5 are part of an ecosystem. It’s not enough to own just a Thunderbolt 5 docking station; you need a laptop with Thunderbolt 5 support and probably high-speed components to connect to. Put simply, Thunderbolt 4 allows connections to a pair of 4K displays at 60Hz; Thunderbolt 5 can connect to two 4K displays at 144Hz, which are considerably more expensive. Those pieces are what I’m lacking here, and what prevents me from writing a “real” review at present.

Further reading: Check out our recommendations for the best Thunderbolt laptop docking stations for more information. Kensington has a solid reputation, and the Kensington Thunderbolt 4 Dual 4K Dock (SD5780T) currently ranks second in our list of best picks.

Thunderbolt 5 is backwards-compatible with Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 3, however, so you can buy this dock even if you don’t have a Thunderbolt 5-capable laptop or peripherals. Incidentally, as Kensington’s documents note, this is a Windows-only dock; Apple has not committed to Thunderbolt 5 support at press time. Kensington also says that its dock is officially certified by Intel.

The SD5000TS falls into what I’d typically call a “hub” category. Instead of dedicated display ports, the dock includes three upstream Thunderbolt 5 connections, which can be used for display, storage, and more. You don’t need to own a display with a dedicated Thunderbolt port to use it with this dock. Kensington supplied a 4K/8K HDMI to USB-C cable for use with this dock, though you will have to purchase something similar.

Otherwise, the front of the dock includes a downstream Thunderbolt 5 port to your laptop, which will supply up to 140W for content-creation PCs or for light gaming. To receive 140W, your laptop must support what’s known as the USB-C PD3 3.1 EPR — you’ll need to dive deep into your laptop’s specs to confirm that’s the case. Otherwise, there’s an additional upstream Thunderbolt 5 port (supplying 60W for charging and DisplayPort 2.1), a 10Gbps USB-A port, and a microSD and SD card slot supporting up to UHS-II/SD 4.0 speeds. There’s also a headphone jack.

On the rear of the dock, there are two more Thunderbolt 5 ports, two more 10Gbps USB-A ports, 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and a power button that lights a small LED on the front of the dock when on. The dock itself measures a fairly chunky 8.9 inches by 3.8 inches by 1.6 inches, and must lie flat on the desk. At 2.15lb, it’s not going anywhere either. The Thunderbolt cable extends by just over three feet.

How the Kensington SD5000T5 performs in the lab

Unfortunately, my own test bed is set up for Thunderbolt 4 devices. I have a single display capable of 4K144 output, but my multiple displays are primarily 4K60. Though this will undoubtedly change, Kensington representatives told me that there are just two laptops that they know of, as of press time, with the “Barlow Ridge” Thunderbolt 5 chip inside; a version of the Razer Blade and the Maingear ML-17. I have neither, but hope to soon. Nor can I test the other key feature that Thunderbolt 5 offers, the ability to connect to an external GPU.

Eventually I hope to be able to write a more formal review, which this will inform. But for now, we’ll have to call it a hands-on and hope for better in the future.

Kensington didn’t ask me to install any drivers to use the SD5000T5. My existing displays (one 4K60, and the other 4K144 capable) took a bit longer to light up than normal, though that isn’t unusual.

The only error I noticed was that once, after resuming from sleep, my 4K144 display glitched badly, with an indecipherable mess of an image.

That occurred on my daily system, which includes a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports. I was able to connect my other test laptops, with Thunderbolt 4 ports, to the dock and to the two displays — with the 4K144 display lighting up at 144Hz, as expected. (One of the laptops wouldn’t do so until after a Windows update). These all ran stably.

An Acer Swift Edge with an AMD Ryzen 7000 chip inside wouldn’t connect to the dock at all, however. That laptop uses a USB4 interface, which should be compatible with Thunderbolt 5 and its USB4 V2 underpinnings, but it didn’t work. Future updates might change this.

My laptops do not support the USB-C PD3 3.1 EPR spec, so while the Kensington SD5000T5 might support 140W power delivery, my laptop recorded 92W — that’s still not bad at all, especially for light gaming. I recorded the dock providing 56W from the other Thunderbolt ports, absolutely sufficient for fast-charging a smartphone. The USB-A port generated 2.5W.

I streamed 4K60 streams from YouTube and local files without dropping a single frame, which was fun! (Well, that’s not totally true, I flicked the mouse and dropped one).

In my PCMark storage tests using an external SSD, the test returned 131.36MB/s of write speed, or a score of 860. Thunderbolt docks — even Thunderbolt 5 docks — tend to lag their DisplayLink counterparts by about 10MB/s, and that still seems to be the case here. The write score fell to 126.32MB/s while a 4K video was being streamed on another display. (For reference, the SSD writes at 160.67MB/s or a score of 1,042 when directly connected to the laptop).

Copying a folder with a bundle of multimedia files between the SSD and the desktop completed in 1:02.29 or 1:05.40 while streaming in the background. That’s faster than normal, though not by much.

Kensington is one of a few brands I recommend to friends, though their docks aren’t cheap. The SD5800T I reference above has a MSRP of $379.99, though it’s on sale at Amazon for $100 less. I wouldn’t expect the first Thunderbolt 5 docks to hit the sale bin that fast.

So far, the Kensington SD5000T5 seems solid, save for that one visual glitch. Some of the dock’s killer features, will have to wait. I want to try to test it with some additional high-resolution, high-refresh-rate displays soon and maybe even an external GPU dock, too. All of these things make the Kensington SD5000T5 and Thunderbolt 5 a very tempting platform! Just keep in mind that you’ll need more than just this dock.

Editor’s Note: The primary image has been altered to enhance the Thunderbolt 5 logo.