J5Create unveiled an upcoming Thunderbolt 5 dock at CES. This particular product stood apart by offering both an MXM graphics card built into it and an M.2 slot for an SSD, plus a good selection of high-speed I/O (via Tweakers).
The JTD5174 dock has two variants: one fitted with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 laptop card, and the other with an AMD Radeon RX 7600M. These GPUs use the MXM form factor, which was introduced just over a decade ago to provide laptops with a standard for modular graphics cards. MXM never really caught on, but hasn’t quite gone extinct the same way technologies like CrossFire and SLI did. In recent years, the RX 6600 and the Arc A380 made it to the MXM format.
MXM might be seeing a bit of a revival thanks to external GPU solutions, such as J5Create’s dock. Compared to laptops, docks would generally have more room for an MXM graphics card, and doing an upgrade probably would be easier in a dock too. Though, with very few MXM GPUs on the market, owners of the JTD5174 dock may not be able to upgrade any time soon.
Additionally, it seems the dock has a performance mode switch that users can use to set the GPU to performance mode or silent mode, which sets the power limit to either 100 watts or 60 watts.
J5Create also advertises that the dock has AI capabilities thanks to its “NPU,” but we suspect that the company just means the GPU is also good for AI workloads. On the dock’s product information sheet, J5Create always says “GPU/NPU,” and we know that neither the 3060 nor the 7600M has an integrated NPU. This is probably just marketing fluff to suit today’s AI-centric climate.
The dock also features an M.2 slot for SSDs that can fit 2280-sized drives. Although Thunderbolt 5 has twice the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4 or three times with Bandwidth Boost mode, it’s not clear if this dock supports PCIe 5.0 SSDs. But if it did, we’d probably expect J5Create to mention it, and since it doesn’t, the dock likely only supports PCIe 4.0 models. That’s understandable considering a PCIe 4.0 NVMe connection caps out at 64Gbps; PCIe 5.0 would represent 128Gbps, a speed that even Bandwidth Boost mode couldn’t accommodate.
The dock also comes with an assortment of high-speed ports: two USB Gen 3.2 Gen 2 Type A ports, a Thunderbolt 5 port, two HDMI 2.0 ports, two DisplayPort 2.0 ports, and 2.5 gigabit Ethernet. While that’s not a ton of ports compared to regular USB4 docks, it’s about the same amount typically seen on eGPUs with integrated docks.
For power, the dock comes with a 240 watt charger, which allows for up to 100 watts to be delivered to docked devices, a particularly useful feature for laptops.
Tweakers reports that the JTD5174 Thunderbolt 5 dock will be available in the second half of the year for roughly $1,400. High-end USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4 docks cost around $200 to $300, meaning the perks of having Thunderbolt 5, an eGPU, and the ability to add an SSD are worth over a thousand dollars. But if MXM somehow finds its footing with eGPU enclosures and takes off, the ability to upgrade might make that big price tag easier to swallow.
