Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Dock Plus with 2.6 ft Thunderbolt 3

I bought this primarily to connect my two Dell monitors to my Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop with Windows 10. Dell’s product had a 1 month wait. I now have a WFH setup equal to my office one. This was plug and play, very easy and no issues. I adjusted the display setting in Windows 10. So the laptop can be closed, Bluetooth mouse and keyboard and 2 monitors acting as a single large screen connected to this, which connects to the thunderbolt3 on the laptop – I can move windows seamlessly across both monitors. For office work, there is no lag or such issue and I get the additional ports. Apparently it also charges but I had the laptop plugged in already. Does exactly what I wanted it to do with zero setup. Build: looks like a decent piece of kit.

Belkin’s stuff normally comes in their branded white and green packaging while this Thunderbolt 3 Dock Plus arrives in a simple compact plain brown cardboard box.

Open the lid of the box and you’re presented with the dock, which is a fairly featureless black plastic box measuring 165mm wide, 31mm tall when it’s sitting on the four little rubber feet on its base, and 78mm deep. It has its name and the Belkin logo printed tastefully on top, and the plastics are rendered in a variety of surface finishes which give it a feeling of quality.

Then we get to connectivity which is what this dock is all about – on the front is a Thunderbolt 3 socket, headphone socket and a single USB 3.1 Generation 2 socket. I do wish there were more USB sockets right here on the front of the dock, but hey ho, I’ll need to find these elsewhere.

On the back is a gigabit ethernet socket, then four USB 3.1 sockets, two in type A format, two type C. After this you have your two big displayport sockets and finally the power-in socket which needs a 20V supply.

So that’s the top of the box, but why is it so big? It’s when you open the next layer that things start to unwind a bit – you have a power supply with captive cable that runs to the dock – this power supply is almost as big as the dock itself and is bigger than the power supply that came with my laptop. You get two power cables to connect the mains to the power supply, one for the UK market and one for Europe that goes straight in the recycling as waste.

Finally you get a 48cm Displayport 3 cable – the product title says 2.6ft which it quite definitely isn’t. At a foot and a half you really have to consider where you position this dock in relation to your screen. I guess you could just go and buy the cable length you require but at such a hefty price for this dock you’d think Belkin might bundle in a few more cables to make your life easier.

I can’t flaw this dock in use, it gives a bunch of connectivity that is really niche – I do wish there were more USB sockets on the front which would make it a more workmanlike tool, but I guess there are a handful round the back.