Lexar’s PexarBolt Ultra is the sexy Thunderbolt dock AI nerds will love
Wow.
I don’t need this. You don’t need this. My list of the best Thunderbolt docks is brutal in how I try to cut out the fat and gristle of unnecessary features in an effort to save cost. But sometimes just pulling up to a fancy steakhouse in a Ferrari is satisfying. And at an MSRP of $649…yeah. Ferrari prices, for sure.
The PexarBolt Ultra is manufactured by Lexar, a known name in memory — which has enjoyed its own rise into luxury pricing, sadly. This is the company’s first docking station. Anyone making the trip to the IFA show in Berlin on Sept. 4 will be able to see it in person, though Lexar will be raising funds via Kickstarter to begin with at about that time. There, you can buy it for $479 — still about $120 or so more than what I’d like to pay for a Thunderbolt 5 dock.
Lexar
At its roots, the PexarBolt Ultra shares the same basic features as other Thunderbolt 5 docks: 80Gbps in either direction, increasing to 120Gbps if needed via a Thunderbolt 5 technology called Bandwidth Boost. Unfortunately, Thunderbolt 5 controllers are much more common in the Apple Mac ecosystem.
In the Windows world, they’re more commonly found on gaming laptops…which favor the bright, informative aesthetic that the PexarBolt Ultra plays to. From a productivity aspect, Thunderbolt 5 also can drive three 4K displays at 144Hz apiece, providing both smooth mousing and scrolling as well as refresh rates for gamers.
There’s another aspect: The dock only supplies 140W to the laptop. That’s fine for normal productivity laptops and possibly even gaming laptops in a “silent” mode where the discrete GPU isn’t in use. While gaming, however, a gaming laptop would have to draw power from the battery to keep up. Again, however, this is typical of all Thunderbolt 5 docking stations.
