Which dock do I pick for Latitude 5480? WD15, D3100 or D6000?

Hi DJ_Mo,

Thanks for posting.

Here is some information you may find helpful:  http://dell.to/2uC6ZGX

Robert,

That link talks about the e-port plus.  The Latitude 5480 cannot connect to the e-port plus.  We're trying to figure out which dock to get instead.

What did you do?  We ordered the WD15.  I need to order more and think the D6000 might be a better fit.  We use the P2314H and P2317H monitors.  I have problem that sometimes my attached monitors do not recover from sleep.  Plugging and replugging will resolve the issue.

And fyi, if your systems were ordered with the Thunderbolt 3 option, you can add the TB16 dock to your list.  It's basically the same as the WD15 except it has DP, mDP, HDMI, and VGA all on the dock, and it also has 4x the display bandwidth available from the host thanks to Thunderbolt -- so instead of being limited to dual 1080p @ 60 Hz, it can do dual 4K @ 60 Hz, as well as a few triple and even quad display configurations.  It is however more expensive and is NOT backward compatible with systems that have only USB-C without Thunderbolt 3.

HDMI is not unresponsive during sleep/wake options just by virtue of being HDMI.  With the WD15 and TB16, the system is only outputting native DisplayPort to the dock, and the dock (or active adapter if you're using one) is responsible for converting the signal for the display, so HDMI itself would make no practical difference.  Any issues reported with sleep/wake issues on HDMI would have some other underlying cause.  With the D6000, again the display traffic leaving the system is always the same, regardless of the connector that you use for the dock.

Forget the D3100.  The D6000's only advantage over the WD15 is that it works both with systems that have USB-C ports and systems that only have USB-A ("regular USB") ports, although it won't charge systems in the latter case.  Still, this means it can be useful for offices that have "hotel desks" rather than individually assigned desks AND currently have a mix of USB-C and "legacy" systems.  HOWEVER, the D6000 is limited to providing 60W to USB-C systems, whereas the WD15 can go up to 130W when the dock itself is powered by a 180W adapter.

The larger distinction though is that the two docks handle displays completely differently.  The WD15 taps into the GPU output directly wired to the USB-C port of the host system, and as such it works just as the "legacy" docks do.  The D6000 on the other hand uses a DisplayLink chip to get video from the host to the dock.  The advantages to this approach are that it can handle more and/or higher resolution displays (the WD15 is limited to dual 1080p @ 60 Hz).  However, there are some notable disadvantages too.  With DisplayLink, instead of having the GPU drive the display directly, a driver is added to the system that causes the CPU and GPU to render that display's image internally, then compress that image and send it over USB as regular data.  The DisplayLink chip inside the dock then decompresses it and sends it to the display.  This compression behavior means that even on a fast system using USB 3.0, under certain conditions you may observe compression artifacts (e.g. blockiness) or sluggish motion.  One problem condition is when large portions of the display are changing simultaneously, e.g. watching full-screen video or gaming, since that means a lot more data has to be compressed and transmitted than when you're just typing an email and 98% of the display is static.  When I've watched full-screen video on a DisplayLink display, the video sort of alternates between slow motion and fast-forward, so on average it stays in sync with the audio, but it looks awkward.  Other problematic scenarios are when your CPU is bogged down on some other intensive task, leaving less performance available to perform this display data compression, or if your USB bus is saturated with some other traffic, such as transferring a lot of data to/from a fast drive, leaving less bandwidth to get the display data to the display.

All that said, those issues admittedly aren't an issue for a most typical office use cases, and might therefore be outweighed by factors such as the ability to run more and/or higher resolution displays and the broader laptop model compatibility -- again, unless you have systems that require more than 60W of power, in which case you'd need a D6000 dock and a separate AC adapter to connect directly to such systems waiting at the desk.  But in the interest of making an informed decision, I still felt it was worth noting all of the material differences.