E5580 + D6000 = bad perfomance

Hi SirMacke,

Thanks for posting.

Apologies that your systems are not working as you expected.  

Here is some information from the Dell Knowledge Base you may find helpful:

A guide to Docking Stations and Port Replicators on Dell Latitude and Precision Notebooks

Support for Dell Universal Dock D6000

Update the DisplayLink drivers, which you can get at DisplayLink.com.  If that doesn't fix it, the D6000 dock uses DisplayLink for its video outputs rather than having them driven directly by the system's GPU.  This has several side effects:

- If you use a system with switchable graphics (i.e. Intel GPU and discrete GPU), the discrete GPU will not be able to accelerate content on DisplayLink-attached displays.  This is a Windows limitation.

- DisplayLink uses the internal CPU and GPU to render display data and then compress it to transmit it as regular USB traffic, and then the DisplayLink chip in the dock decompresses it and sends it to the displays.  This compression and transmission as USB traffic creates overhead on the system.  Consequently, if you have large portions of the display area changing at once (such as when playing full screen video or gaming), and/or your CPU is already heavily utilized with other tasks, and/or your USB bus is already busy shuttling a lot of other data around, you can observe lag because your system simply might not have the available resources to compress and then transmit the required amount of data quickly enough.

Docks that tap into the actual GPU output(s) wired to the system's USB-C/Thunderbolt port, such as the WD15 and TB16, do not have this issue -- but the D6000 doesn't work that way, even when attached via USB-C.  The main advantage to the D6000 is that it can be attached via either USB-C or USB-A, so for companies that have a mix of older system that lack USB-C/Thunderbolt and those that do have it, it's a convenient standardization option.  With USB-A, the ONLY option for transmitting video is DisplayLink,. The D6000's use of DisplayLink compression also means that it can technically support up to 3x 4K displays, which would not be possible via native GPU outputs.  But the DisplayLink design also has its drawbacks.

My system has the i7 7820HQ and HD630 GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB M.2 SSD

The DisplayLink software/drivers are the latest.

We took the D6000 as we are running 3 screens on a daily basis.

One would think it would at least handle scrolling down a webpage without lagging.

Why oh why did Dell cut the old and better E-port.

For what it's worth, YouTube and scrolling work just fine on my Latitude 7480 when attached to a D6000 running dual 1080p displays.  I've never tried a triple display configuration, though.

Removing the E-Dock is certainly disruptive, but if you consider USB-C/Thunderbolt its replacement (neither of which the D6000 properly uses), then it's arguably a step forward.  For example, using an industry-standard rather than proprietary connector means you can use Dell systems with non-Dell docks or non-Dell systems with Dell docks.  My wife is enjoying these benefits right now because she has a WD15 dock at her home office desk, to which she can connect her personal XPS 13 or her work-issued Lenovo laptop.  If she wanted this flexibility before, she'd have needed to keep two separate docks on her desk, which is bulky, and have to move display and USB cables back and forth between the two depending on which system she wanted to use while docked, which is highly inconvenient.  Or I suppose she could have bought a small KVM to solve the latter problem, but that's more cost and complexity and doesn't solve the desk real estate issue.  The WD15 is much smaller than an E-Dock and doesn't require your laptop to be locked into it, which means you have more flexibility over where you locate the dock relative to the laptop.  For example, the dock can be kept way at the back of the desk while the laptop is pulled more closely to her to better view its built-in display while it remains docked.