Dell D3100 Docking Station, USB 3.0 Ultra HD Triple Video
Dell D3100 Docking Station, USB 3.0 Ultra HD Triple Video (DisplayPort, 2x HDMI, 6x USB, RJ45) Black – UK Versio
Easily connect laptops to external devices
USB 3.0 connects your laptop to up to three additional monitors, various external devices and the Internet with a single cable. This sleek, compact dock unlocks enhanced productivity and entertainment options with high-speed connectivity and support for Ultra HD 4K displays. Designed for Ultra HD 4K resolution, this USB 3.0 universal docking station enables compatible PC’s to display 4K resolution when connected.
Advanced networking and security for enterprise use
The Dell Docking Station – USB 3.0 is a great choice for corporate environments with Wake-On-LAN and PXE boot (on selected platforms). There’s also an integrated cable lock slot (lock sold separately), so the dock can be secured to a desk or workstation.
| Weight: | 286 g |
| Dimensions: | 52.58 x 38.1 x 28.45 cm; 285.76 Grams |
| Brand: | Dell |
| Model: | 0914146 |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Dell |
| Dimensions: | 52.58 x 38.1 x 28.45 cm; 285.76 Grams |
Bought a refurbished docking station for my Dell 3891 desktop PC which had only 1 HDMI port for 4K , its working perfectly after I realised I had to download the software for it (available at Dell), lucky the latest version fixed a no display bug for the two Dell S2721DS 4K monitors I am using, you also have to keep one of the HDMI cables connected to the PC for the monitors to display.
This product has a very high quality, sturdy feel to it. The primary requirement for this purchase was to attach dual monitors to my laptop which does not have a USB C socket. The item is supplied with the cables for the USB A connection and the set-up is very straightforward. It took only a few minutes to have everything functioning properly. The item is exceptionally securely packaged, which is an indication of the high quality of the product. I am very satisfied with my purchase.
Very nice quality product from Dell which has enabled me to seamlessly switch my twin HD screens, webcam, keyboard& mouse and stereo speakers between a Microsoft laptop and Lenovo desktop. I could find no definitive statement over whether this would be possible so this purchase was a bit of a gamble but I can confirm now that it works entirely as hoped. Very pleased with this purchase
Just be aware as the item I bought only include the Dock. None of the ancillaries needed to use were included, so needed to buy separately, bumping up cost.
Great second hand buy, provided you read the details ahead of time and knew the limitations. Item in tip top condition, easy as pie to install and working fine. It came quickly and well packed… what more can you want?
This docking station is expensive but it is worth it. It has every port you need.
The only drawback is that it doesn’t charge the laptop which for the money I paid i would expect to have this feature.
Nevertheless its a good product, just be aware if you are looking to charge the laptop you may be disappointed.
Also it will be nice if in the product description is explained it does not have the functionality to charge the laptop.
4 starts, just because of tha
So far so good, I have both a Macbook Pro and Dell XPS 13 for work. I needed an easy way to switch dual monitors, peripherals etc between the two.
For Windows, quick Display Link driver install from Dell and everything was tickety boo.
On MacOS, it needs a bit of tinkering. Display Link driver install, and the application “Amphetamine” was needed for it to work with the lid closed (“clamshell” mode). Display Link devices don’t work with some Macs when the lid is closed, so the additional “Amphetamine” app prevents the screen from turning off when used in this way.
Everything’s working great though, very happy.
Just works added in the display link driver and all was good, throughput on the network interface lost it a star though 230 mb/sec on 10gbe backbone slightly disappointing as the wifi is faste
If your laptop doesn’t have a thunderbolt USB type c port like mine, then this is next best alternative. To my horror, I never realised one singular USB port could carry so much signal – ethernet, display, other USB stuff, audio…and I thought I worked in IT. Well I have for the last 7 years, but that hasn’t been enough to become all-knowing. Well, that’s a shame. Not the DELL docks fault mind you. The only thing this dock doesn’t dock is a boat – #TitanicFail
Good connectivity. The only improvemnent I could suggest is an on/off switch for each usb slot. Tis would remove the need to unpug items such as art pads when not in use and would save small amount of power.
Easy to install- plug and go! Although I have the same docking station at work too! Bought primarily as needed a monitor with a laptop for home working. The docking station means I can plug the laptop/monitor/mouse and keyboard in with the laptop and have a better working environment at home.
D3100 Docking Station: This device was bought after a cheaper USB-C version failed to work. I wanted a docking station which would include USB ports, audio and screen extending onto 3 external screens. This product uses DisplayLink which worked out of the box on Win10, but required a driver install (available from Dell’s website) for Windows 7. The front 3 ports are USB 3, with 2 rear USB 2 (e.g. for Keyboard / Webcam). There is a front headphone socket and rear headphone/mic socket. I don’t have any need for the ethernet connection in this instance. The device is great, and allows my to use my desk setup of monitors, keyboard, mouse, webcam with any computer I attach (e.g. laptop / desktop etc). Because it doesn’t require DP Alt Mode, it works on older USB machines. Highly recommended. I bought a refurbished model, which was near new, but would have paid the full price if that wasn’t available. The ease of setup makes it worth it.
I wanted a dock to connect two monitors to my laptop as well as my mouse and keyboard. I’d bought other cheaper docks which just mirrored my laptop screen across my two monitors. This dock allows you to connect the monitors and use them independently. The dock was really easy to set up following the instructions provided. It works perfectly with my HP laptop and my work Surface Pro.
I gave this a lot of thought and finally decided to go for a Dell docking station rather than other cheaper models. I use it with a Razer Stealth laptop with Windows 10 and this was super easy to install. I use two types of connectors and my two monitors work perfectly with it. Overall a great purchase.
Only thing to note is that this doesn’t charge the laptop – it connects through the USB 3 socket on the laptop, not the USB C. Accordingly you have to have the dock connected to mains power as well as the laptop separately connected to mains power. Not a big deal though.
Very pleased with my setup now.
So thing guy works great, I don’t know how many times I’m going to fall for those dongles that apparently just work with 2 hdmis etc but my glad this works. Use it for my personal laptop when I need to use my works hot desk. (It’s a HP hot desk, so I just need to change the hubs and plug the laptop in)
I have purchased this item for my HP Elitebook 840 G6 to connect to a 1x 34 inch Ace Predator X34 and 2 x 24 inch Dell monitors. While it can do this in fact on all three monitors I ran into a problem where by the refresh rate on the acer monitor drops via Display port below 60 Hz, the monitor can support up to a 100 and anything under 60 is just gives my eyes a lot of strain.
The problem is that it I expect this to support this but it didnt, it is my own fault and therefore I will be returning this. If you have a laptop which supports thurnderbolt please make sure to research this prior, this dock is not a good fit for a 3440×1440 if you want to run it at least at 60 hz
I upgraded from a slightly cheaper generic dock, which did not support my new 4K monitor. Just make sure that you use the right video connection – best to make the Display Port the main/best monitor and then HDMIs for the other one/two. The USB3s perform well I have connected my high speed NAS (USB-C/3). Also Ethernet seems to work fine and just as fast (early days). I did run out of USB2 ports on the back so had to use up some of the USB3’s for things like microphones. Down to just one cable to dock my laptop (2 if you include the power).
Doesn’t have all the features like USB-C some dell docking stations have but it’s got all the basics needed with 2 HDMI out and lots of USB ports. Bought it for compatibility to use with my office dell laptop but it does tend to lose the monitor signal for a few seconds from time to time. Overall solid product.
Like a lot of people, I imagine, I got my Dell D3100 docking station when I started working from home at the outbreak of Covid19. Suddenly the room I’d always earmarked as an office needed to actually become an office!
From the start, it’s worked great, and is a nicely compact bit of kit that isn’t taking up desk space. Just needed one AI ole driver download at the beginning which was no issue.
Personally, I’m running 2 HDMI monitors out the back which have both worked perfectly from the word go, whilst in the front 3 USB ports I’ve got plugged in a mouse, keyboard and headset. Everything plug & played without issue. And with this setup all running off the Dell D3100 I’ve got everything I need to run my home office. No complaints.
Here’s to lots more working from home when the lockdown is ove
I have been fed up for ages having to plug in various cables and then unplug them when I want to change something or move. I set this up some time ago and now that I’m working from home I can have everything I may need permanently plugged in and ready to go. If I want to move, just one cable to unplug. Excellent value like all Dell equipment and excellent price and service from this supplier!
I bought my Dell dock because I had one at work and I liked this one so I just had to have one at home as well. I am working as a software engineer and a technical architect and I do lot of work from home.
I am used to multi screen environment and at home I use three extra monitors for my laptop.
I have been using my dock for 12 months and it simply works all the time. I have never experienced connection issues, flickering monitors, unstable network etc.
If I would be buying one now I would go for the Dell D6000
I wanted to expanded my monitor real estate for a while and kept putting it off as there are so many docks at various price points. I finally bit the bullet and purchased one of the cheapest ones I could find from a brand I trust. The dock was super easy to install and before I knew it I was running an additional two monitors from my laptop (so I had three monitors going in total) and all the wires I usually had running from my laptops USB ports were now hidden away connected to the dock. Not only that, the way I set up the dock on my desk means I have three more USB ports (on the front of the dock) to charge devices and connect externalHD’s to as and when required. I should have done this sooner! A great dock for anyone starting out down the expansion route.
I have one of these at work, and it worked great with my Windows machine I use there which prompted me to buy one for home use to support a dual monitor setup.
However at home I run Linux (Fedora 28/29) and I’ve had pretty bad issues with the DisplayLink drivers. From what I understand on Linux the DisplayLink drivers recruit the CPU to aid in graphical operations which leads to MONSTROUS CPU usage from DisplayLink. On my laptop (Dell XPS13 2015) I see CPU usage regularly sitting at 70-90%. This drops to 10% if there’s no action on the screen but even the movement of a cursor causes it to jump to those high ranges.
This bit of kit works great and does its job well when supported by the correct software – but buyer beware if you try getting this working with Linux. Your mileage may vary. This isn’t really an issue with the product itself, so I’m giving the product 5 stars because it’s otherwise great.
My only disappointment was that I missed the fact that it can’t support two 4K monitors at the same time, only a 4K on one port and lower resolutions on the others. I had looked at several and by the time I found “Ultra HD Triple Video” thought it supported up to three 4K monitors. Well, it does, but not with them actually at 4K.
It’s true that had I downloaded the spec first or read all the questions the information was there but I think the description is misleading.
As far as its specification goes, it works well, I use the USB 2 and 3 ports and the Displayport to a 4K monitor running at 3480×2161 plus an HDMI port to another 4K monitor running at 2560×1440.
I gave 4 stars based on the 5 for quality and working smoothly but 3 for description.
This lets me do that, i run two 24 inch monitors plus the Laptop screen, keyboard, mouse, network and audio cables all through this dock. It swaps between my personal MacBook and my work Surface Pro. So i don’t have to have one specific piece of kit for either setup its just power for the device and a USB cable. What more could you want in a dock!!! Also has the added extra of me being able to add another monitor should i want to appear more NASA like lol
This dock is multi-platform and works with Mac, Linux and PC and for 130 quid its a bargain.
Bought this dock for working at home with my work Dell laptop – amazed to find it works with my Asus chromebook out of the box , I have two monitors and the internal display , plus cabled networking all through the USB port/dock, with no lag at all. No extra drivers needed on chromebook , all setup straight away – amazing!
I Can’t really say the same about windows/Dell drivers – , big drivers download needed – sometimes forgets the dock drivers exist, when hotpluging after meetings – but quite stable in normal use.
But at the end of the day, its a smart little box if you want a usb3 multi monitor setup, and at decent price from the seller.
EDIT 02/06/2020 – I wrote the above review back on Nov 2017. The docking station is still going strong, and has proven invaluable now I work and study at home constantly during the COVD-19 pandemic. Switching between the work and home laptops is simple with just switching over the USB cable from one to the other.
Installation was the typical Windows experience, plug and play. It grabbed the drivers online and worked without a hitch. I use this on Windows 10 in case anyone is interested.
User experience is very good too, so far I haven’t experienced any sort of lag or any issues for that matter.
The entire base of the unit is rubberised so it should grip to most desk surfaces quite well – however due to it’s light weight any trailing cables at the rear of the unit can displace it if you’re not careful. I would recommend using some sort of cable management to tie the cables to the desk to prevent this from happening. This is only a very minor gripe though.
I’m not a big fan of video compression on principle, but display link (built in) seems to be OK. The ideal dock would be one just like this but using the USB (c) thunderbolt port with no compression, but until that comes along this one is brillia
I have a high performance Dell 7510, Xeon processor, 64GB ram, 4k screen with M.2 SSD’s it is the bomb..
It also has 1x HDMI and 1x mini Display port.
Despite all this, when connecting my 2 x 4k wide screen monitors directly from the laptops HDMI and Display Port I can never ever get the colours on both looking right. HDM and Display Port will give different colours and contrast, you need to have both HDMI or display port. I even got an adapter to go Display port to HDMI so they was both connected via HDMI. But this was also no good.
I spent months frustrated with poor image quality, colours and ghosting on the text. (yes all my drivers was up to date)
I plunged for the USB 3.0 HD Triple Video adapter. (I refuse to call it a docking station as you do not dock the laptop on it)
This small piece of kit is simply amazing,
Before plugging in the adapter via USB, first visit displaylink.com and download the latest driver for your OS.
I then plugged in the the adapter and plugged both my monitors, 1 with HDM and one with Display Port.
Oh know!… I still have crap looking screens…
But Wait.. this adapter has 2 HDMI ports so why not try going directly from HDMI to HDMI..
I connected both monitors via HDMI, the max output gave me 1920×1080 on one monitor and a max of 25601440 on another. You can only output 2560 on one monitor.
This was fine for my needs, I use the higher resolution for photo editing and the other screen for emails and docs etc..
What was so perfect was the fact (despite different screen resolutions) I finally had 2 perfect matching screens both showing the same colour and contrast / brightness with no ghosting what so ever!
If my laptop had 2 HDMI ports then I would not have needed this so if you are in the same position or similar then do not hesitate to try this.
To sum up, The HDMI ports are full HDMI, there is no midi HDMI. The Display port is also a full display port not a mini display port.
The extra USB 3 ports come in hand as does the network port.
Get it.. It just works..
Setup of the Docking station, if you follow the instructions EXACTLY, is a breeze. It seems that this is in fact mostly due to the excellent hardware and driver software provided by Displaylink but Dell get credit for clear instructions and a neat package. Maybe it is time to return to Dell after 10 years or more away from them; they used to be the best once. It could be improved if the USB 3 cable supplied, which is a very strange one that goes to a keyhole shaped port on the back of the unit, has a very stiff cable which is a problem with a light laptop. A flexible, perhaps flat cable would be much better and, even better, one that has the USB at 90deg to the cable so that it does not need much side room would be good. That said, the USB plugs in firmly and well and the real miracle is that it works – so much data is transmitted seamlessly. I have now, within an hour of starting work got 4 monitors each showing different information and gigabit ethernet:
0. 2736×1824
1. 1050×1680
2. 1920×1200
3 1080×1920
Gigabit ethernet connection.
Better still, on one of the monitors I have got a separate 3 way switch (not part of the Dell) so that I can connect a different PC to that monitor. When I press the button this switch disconnects a monitor from the Dell. The Dell/Windows 10 detects the change and I have a 3 monitor system. Click it again and it goes back to being a 4 monitor system. This is not quite flawless. Every now and then, one of the monitors will not be correctly synched. Turning the Dell on and Off once (pull out the power cable so keep it in reach) fixes this, so it is not very bad as it happens infrequently (one to work on though Dell/Displaylink/Microsoft ! ).
What’s not to like? Well the Dell User Guide says that the Displaylink software will be loaded with the Drivers and will provide you with some extra functionality that resizes the image on each monitor. Well it doesn’t, at least on my Windows 10 system. No software is evident anywhere and I really do need to resize one of my displays. At full monitor resolution all the borders of the display are lost…moving windows then becomes very difficult.
I have connected a USB mouse to the unit but it is not recognised. I’ve tried various ports to no avail. No mouse.
Not all of the USB ports on the USB hub are powered. This is strange because the transformer is a 65watt one and the unit runs only a little bit warmer than room temperature so it is not using much power. So, it is rather annoying that you can’t connect and get power on all 5 USB ports if you should need to. It is also likely to lead to confusion about which one is good for power and some discharged devices from time to time so it is not very user friendly.
Given my expectations of what Windows would do for me, this gets a 5. Someone meaner might have made it a 4 because of the flaws above but, heck, this is an enormous improvement on past Windows kit.
That said, it works great. I was apprehensive at some of the reviews but honestly, it’s flawless so far. Before I continue, my laptop: It’s a Dell Ultrabook with 8GB RAM with a Corei5 CPU. I read somewhere (I’m sure it was on the Dell site) that it recommends a Core i7. That seemed a little odd to me and thankfully that isn’t the case.
Setup: Download the Windows 10 drivers from the DisplayLink website. The ones Dell provide on their site didn’t allow connected monitors to work in Windows 10. If you do install them by mistake however, Windows 10 should show a pop-up that you need to update the drivers. Once I’d run the DisplayLink driver installer and rebooted, everything came to life. I have 2 23″ 1080p monitors connected. You need to go into display settings and use the box that lets you drag the monitor positions around. Once you have that set up, you’re away.
I also have a stereo amplifier plugged into the device and my audio is now much better as my laptop output jack was playing up previously.
People mentioned display lag: For me there is none at all. I’m pleasantly surprised at how flawless it all is. I use a Lenovo X1 Carbon at work (expensive ultrabook) with a Lenovo device which does a similar job to this D3100 and I get lots of display lag on that.
Tip: Turn off the Windows 10 screen ‘snap’ system. It’s buried in settings under System > Multi-tasking > Snap (or search snap in the start menu). Otherwise every time you drag a window onto one of your external monitors, the window will try to snap into place at the bottom of the external screen.
FY: I haven’t tried the displayport connection or 4k and I’m not using the wired ethernet port so I can’t comment on the performance of those. I have 2 1080p monitors connected via HDMI, a stereo amp via 3.5mm jack, a mouse and an external hard drive and all work perfectly. No screen lack or dodgy connections.
I’m over the moon that I went ahead. I used to have a gaming PC connected up and sadly it’s now so old and my laptop is much faster. This device has at least made my laptop a good device to use at my desk.
Runs 3 monitors (laptop screen still running), countless USB things via extra hubs and audio out through one USB cable.
One disappointment: Handles audio out, but not microphone in.
Two annoyance:
The 2 video outputs are 1x DisplayPort and 2x HDMI.
For DisplayPort output DVI-D adaptors do not work, but HDMI do.
For HDMI outputs DVI-D adaptors do work and one is supplied.
Occasionally, maybe once per day, maybe less, all the external monitors turn off momentarily which moves all open windows to the laptop screen.
One bonus:
HDMI outputs support 1920 x 1200 display, despite documentation saying 1920 x 1080 max. However I am not running max resolution on the DisplayPort output which may be significant.
Despite the above 5 stars because this device is awesome.
So my laptop now runs in Stamina mode all the time, and when i plug the docking station in, it automatically detects the external monitor, when i unplug, it moves all the open windows back to the laptop screen (ie detects it is disconnected). Very satisfied.