Hello, any news about this topic?

Hi,
I have replied to your private note.
Regards,
Mausam

@druotolo  there's no industry-wide standard for an external Power button.  It's something that vendors all implement via their own proprietary solutions, which require firmware-level support within the system to allow itself to be controlled from that external button.  The D6000 is marketed as a "universal" dock, including non-Dell systems, and since there's no way to have a universal external Power button, it doesn't have one.  The WD19, WD19TB etc. are not billed as universal docks.  However, even within Dell's own system lineup, it seems that Dell hasn't implemented support for an external power button across all product lines.  The Latitude, Precision, and XPS systems have them because the WD family docks are explicitly marketed as being fully compatible with those systems.  But support for this on Inspiron, Vostro, and Alienware systems seems much less consistent.  Incidentally, there are other features of the WD family docks that also require firmware support from the system, including MAC Address Passthrough, possibly Wake on LAN, and I believe even the ability to update the firmware of the dock, since that involves a system reboot and an update that occurs during boot time, sort of like a BIOS update.  So you might find that you can't update the dock's firmware from certain Dell systems either.

Hi,
I have replied to your message in the community.
Regards,
Gopal

Thanks for writing in.
we will take this as a feedback.
Regards,
Mausam

Thanks a lot for your clarification, I have a clearer picture now.

I think that the power on/off through a docking station is a kinda "(vendor-)basic feature" that all laptops (of the same vendor) should support, since the configuration closed lid + external monitor is a really common one. I hope Dell will support this in the future for all its laptops.

Hi @jphughan  and @DELL-Cares  ,

I have one more question regarding this topic: Googling a lit bit I've read that external monitors connected through the docking station will use the Intel GPU, not the nVidia GPU. Can you please confirm (or not) this behaviour on both this docking stations:

- WD19TB

- D6000

Thanks,

best regards

@druotolo  the answer to the GPU question is a bit more complicated on both sides.

The D6000 uses DisplayLink.  Due to a Windows limitation, displays attached via DisplayLink can only use GPU acceleration from the system's primary GPU.  On a system with both an Intel and NVIDIA GPU enabled, that will be the Intel GPU.  So you'd never get the benefit of the NVIDIA GPU.  But it's worse than that.  DisplayLink technology itself imposes some significant drawbacks for certain use cases, including and especially gaming.  I wrote about those in detail in this thread, specifically the post marked as the answer.  The bottom line is that DisplayLink performance is even worse than a display that was driven "normally" by the Intel GPU, even if it didn't have access to the NVIDIA GPU.

The WD19 family taps into the system's native GPU outputs available on USB-C or Thunderbolt 3.  As a result, none of the penalties of DisplayLink apply, and displays attached to that dock will have access to the NVIDIA GPU just as if you attached a display directly to the system.  However, on most display outputs of systems -- and all USB-C/T3 outputs that I've seen on Dell systems thus far -- the Intel GPU still has direct control of the output itself.  That means that the NVIDIA GPU when needed steps in as a render-only device to do the heavy lifting and then passes completed video frames to the Intel GPU for output to the attached displays.  This technology is called NVIDIA Optimus.  The vast majority of laptops are set up this way because by preventing the NVIDIA GPU from having direct control of display outputs, it can be completely disabled when it's not needed, which saves battery life.  If the NVIDIA GPU had direct control of outputs, then it would need to be active whenever a display was attached, even if nothing graphics-intensive was going on.  The catch is that there are certain technologies that the Intel GPU doesn't support passing through and/or that NVIDIA GPUs can only use if they have direct control of the display output.  These include VR, G-Sync, Adaptive V-Sync, stereoscopic 3D, and a few others.  However, once again that isn't a limitation of the dock.  It's simply an aspect of the system design.  Certain systems have at least some display outputs directly wired to the NVIDIA GPU instead specifically to make it possible to use those technologies I just listed, but I don't know if the 5590 is set up that way, and once again on every Dell system I've seen, the USB-C/TB3 ports are always wired to the Intel GPU (except the Precision 7000 Series models where a BIOS option allows you to choose which GPU has control of the display outputs).

Is there anyone working on implementing this feature to turn on Inspiron series laptops with the WD-19 dock?

It is unexpected that a 1500 euro laptop is not fully operational with a same brand 300 euro dock.