Aten Thunderbolt 3 Multiport Dock Review

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Aten has quite a large portfolio with products ranging from KVM, Professional AV equipment, Rack PDU along with all sorts of cables. Lately, they have been investing in their USB-C and Thunderbolt lineups and part of that is today's UH7230 Multiport Dock.

The UH7230 is an all-out connectivity slinging solution allowing 8 devices to be connected at any one time. It takes advantage of 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 and the USB-C connector while also being backwards compatible with Gen 2 USB 3.1.

To start things off the Aten offers Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 Type-C and AV connectivity. This is followed by a Type-C input that offers 85W of charging and a second Thunderbolt 3 port for daisy changing and last a single DisplayPort connector allowing this dock to have dual 4K60p or single 5K60p capability.

MSRP of the Aten UH7230 Multiport Dock comes in at $330.99 with a two-year warranty.

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Aten has a good number of features listed out on packaging. We do get an image of the device that appears to be a 1:1 scale of the device itself.

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The back offers details in several languages and a diagram above-showing connectivity options.

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Included in the box, we have the power adapter rated at 170W and Thunderbolt 3 cable.

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The front houses little branding apart from the logo to the left while to the right we have two USB ports.

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The rear I/O offers the rest of the connectivity options including Gbe, USB 3.0 and Audio in/out. The first Thunderbolt connection offers power delivery as indicated by the logo below, these are followed by the second Thunderbolt 3 port for daisy-chaining and 5K display support and the DisplayPort for 4K60p display support.

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To get the most performance out of a single drive, I used a 2.5" SSD for testing this unit. The USB 3.0 port on the front did seem to be a bit down from where I expected reaching 358 read and 345 write.

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The USB-C port on the front of the unit is a Gen 1 port, that said we ran the same drive through testing to check the performance. As expected numbers were pretty close at 359 MB/s read and 352 MB/s write.

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Moving over to the second TB3 port, we used our Optane Memory drive in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure to get an idea of the performance. As seen above, the drive performed to its full potential 1330 MB/s read and ~300 MB/s write.

As for the rest of the story, the Aten powered up both my 4K panel and my LG Ultrawide with no issues. That said you will need an adapter to go from the daisy chain Thunderbolt 3 port to HDMI or DP, depending on what you have available. The Gig ethernet port performed as expected and audio worked without issues.

Build quality of the dock is pretty solid, the aluminum case offers aesthetics and durability along with being lightweight, less than 1lb for this solution. I expected a little more out of the USB 3.0 performance on this dock but I can't say 350 MB/s read and write is bad by any means, I just know my drive had more performance available.

I wasn't able to test the power delivery features of this solution as my notebook is an antique with its MagSafe 2 connection but it was able to charge my Nintendo Switch at a good clip. That said Aten has done a rather nice job with its Multiport Dock offering a good amount of connectivity options but it does carry a hefty price tag, so make sure you shop around.

Update 6.27.18: After our review, Aten made the decision to update the price to $370 AUD or ~$274.99 USD. This puts this solution in line with competing docks like the 12-port OWC, CalDigit TS3 and Elgato Thunderbolt 3 dock in regards to pricing. However, it does appear this price change is only effective at mwave Australia as current US retailers have yet to update.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Prime Z370 (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i3 8350K (buy from Amazon)
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance 32GB 4x8GB DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: Corsair Hydro H115i (buy from Amazon)
• Case: Corsair Air 540 (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Samsung 960 EVO 250GB (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)
• Wi-Fi NIC: ASUS PCE-AC88 (buy from Amazon)
• 10Gbe NIC: ASUS XG-C100C (buy from Amazon)
• Thunderbolt 3: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)