Kensington SD4000 Docking Station Review

Bohs Hansen / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Kensington SD4000 Universal USB3 Docking Station can be had for $199.99 directly at Kensington or for $174.99 at Newegg. UK readers can find it on Amazon for £160.09 and German readers can find a good deal starting from €214 via Geizhals.

Conclusion

I really like the design Kensington applied to the SD4000 Universal Docking Station and it would look great underneath any 4K monitor, ready to connect your ultrabook or another portable units when you get home. It is small and light, but still has a great stand quality thanks to the flat design. It will stay where you place it.

The ability to add a 4K monitor to your system even tho it doesn’t support it natively from the built-in graphics solutions is awesome and it allows you to use the still pretty expensive monitor that you bought even more. You can use it separately or extend your systems desktop to it. If you shouldn’t need 4K resolution, you can connect two single monitors instead each with a resolution of up to 2K.

The built-in USB ports performed great and there was only minimal performance loss due to the transformation. The addition of a 2.1A charging port to the docking station makes it even more useful, allowing you to charge power-hungry devices such as iPads effectively and fast. The wired LAN connection didn’t perform as good as I’d liked it to, but it still beats a most wireless connections; especially on stability and security. Added soundcard and Kensington lock further add to the value of the unit.

Pros

Easy to use
Good connectivity
4K UHD capability
USB charging port

Cons

LAN performance could be better

“The Kensington SD4000 Universal Docking Station adds all the ports to your portable system that you wished it had. That and the ability to connect 4K monitors to systems that otherwise don’t support UHD makes it a great choice.”