x15 R1, docking station?

Question

Hi,I bought the named notebook. Design, great - feeling - great, performance - great for office at least, no time to play at the moment. Shopping experience? Is "nightmare" the right word?

Anyway, lets come to the point: I want to plug it to a docking station when I am at home so that it will get power, network and two additional monitors. I have a Digitus USB-C docking station here and .. it somehow works until the battery of the laptop is full. After that point, a message appears and tells me that the USB port uses too much power.

Does anyone have a docking station that works? DELL sales will not sell me a docking station because it is not supported.

I can accept that this will not work in gaming mode - but in normal operation it should work. The USB port is built to accept external power sources. I bought the notebook because of the design and the technical specs and not because of gaming.

Best regards,
Roger

jphughan · Accepted Answer

@Shadowblues2 In terms of 'only' having Thunderbolt 3, if you mean as opposed to Thunderbolt 4, then Thunderbolt 4 didn't add any more bandwidth.  For the most part it took certain capabilities that were optional under TB3 and made the mandatory.  But Dell's newer TB3 laptops already implemented those optional features anyway, so the upgrade from TB3 to TB4 is pretty minimal.  One feature that TB4 added was support for Thunderbolt hubs, i.e. rather than running Thunderbolt devices in a daisy chain you can have a single device that has multiple Thunderbolt peripheral ports, but if you don't need to run multiple Thunderbolt peripherals from your system, then that's not going to matter.  And in fact unless you're running a fairly high-end display setup or an actual Thunderbolt peripheral, then having any kind of Thunderbolt support in the dock won't matter.  Unfortunately you didn't provide any information about your two displays.

DELL-Chris M · Answer

Dell Support was correct in that Dell does not sell or support any docks with our Alienware Laptops. We can see on the x15 R1 sales page under Accessories that a dock is not offered.

Shadowblues2 · Answer

Hi Chris,

the official document states:

Thunderbolt 4.0 port with Power Delivery and DisplayPort

Supports USB4, DisplayPort 1.4, Thunderbolt 4 and also enables you to connect to an external display using a display adapter. Provides data transfer rates of up to 40 Gbps for USB4 and Thunderbolt 4.

NOTE: You can connect a Dell Docking Station to the Thunderbolt 4 ports. For more information, see the knowledge base article 000124295 at www.dell.com/support.

So as the docking stations are mentioned in the official documentation, they should work. At least one of them.

Best regards,
Roger

Shadowblues2 · Answer

Hi jphughan,

thank you. I think 100 or even 130W are more than enough for the normal operation - of course not for gaming. Yesterday I charged it with a 90W supply because the car adapter did not work with the alienware power supply.

I just would like a statement from someone who knows that it will definitely work because I don't want to have 10 not working USB-C docking stations at home

Best regards,
Roger

jphughan · Answer

@Shadowblues2 The most that some of today’s Dell docks will provide is 130W. But since that was achieved by a proprietary extension of the 100W max of the USB PD spec, your system might not support receiving that much over USB-C. Dell added support for that on certain systems in their business-oriented product lines, but not for example on their Inspiron systems. But if you want to try it, depending on the display setup you’re running, you can try either the WD19S 180W w/ 130W PD (not the 130W w/ 90W PD) or else the WD19TBS (only comes as 180W w/ 130W PD).

The USB PD spec was very recently revised to define standards up to 240w, but there are no products on the market that use that standard yet except Apple’s new 140W charger when paired with their proprietary MagSafe cable. And I doubt your system would support that if you had a wall charger that supported it.

Shadowblues2 · Answer

I all,

another opinion from the support team that I called because another sales advisor told me so:

I should buy the TB docking station series (https://www.dell.com/de-de/shop/dell-thunderbolt-dock-wd19tb/apd/210-arjd/pc-zubeh%C3%B6r)

What I don't like is, that it has only thunderbolt 3, but ok.

Support told me: Just buy it and send it bak if it does not work.

Best regards,
Roger

Shadowblues2 · Answer

Hi all, just wanted to give you feedback. I got the docking station "WD19TB" at a very low price of not much more than 200 Euros. And it is working fine. You have to use the right video outlets in the described order, but then it works even with an 48" monitor with 3840 x 1080 pixel.

Best regards,
Roger

Shadowblues2 · Answer

Hi all, just some more feedback on that topic:

DIGITUS universal docking station DA-70864 DOES work, however, it does not support 4k monitors - so drop that option

DELL D6000 Universal dock DOES NOT work (bought it because oif a Macbook Air M1)

Best regards,
Roger

Alienware

x15 R1, docking station?

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