Hey all. I was looking for a dock online and noticed a decent amount of third party ones on ebay and Amazon. Anyone tried any, or know a good brand?
I don’t see myself playing on my TV much, just when I have friends over, so I can’t justify the cost of the name brand.
Have a look for USB-C docks that don’t specifically mention “for the steam deck”. They’re all functionally the same but I found a steam deck owner tax when they reference Steam decks in product titles. For example, I picked up a Sabrent dock where reviews mentioned steam deck.
Most of the docks work perfectly well with the Steam Deck. However, there is one technical detail I would like to recommend people look into: DisplayPort and DisplayLink.
There are two methods to drive the display outputs (VGA, HDMI, or DisplayPort) for most docks: DisplayPort alt mode and DisplayLink. DisplayPort alt mode is what you want, and it’ll work flawlessly. It’s the go-to standard for display output over USB-C, Thunderbolt, or USB 4 in general.
DisplayLink is some weird technology developed by Synaptics to drive displays over USB 2 and up. It has a Linux driver, but that driver has tons of issues in my experience; it requires loading an external kernel module compiled from the AUR. With DisplayLink, the entire external screen is rendered by software, so this method comes with a huge hit to CPU resources.
Unless you have installed Windows onto your Deck, I would look exclusively for the DisplayPort capable docks.
Last I looked into them on windows (years ago now) they were very hacky there as well, and of course performed quite poorly. It has a few niche uses allowing you to use more monitors than you could use otherwise, especially on macs where last I checked MST wasn’t implemented but still it’s really a last resort option.
They’re suboptimal in any case, but at least they just work on Windows. I don’t know about Macs, maybe they need some kind of software installation too, but I’m sure the software is a lot easier to install than on Linux.
I think they need a driver on windows too but they might be able to get it through windows update now or it might be included by default. In the past you had to install it manually and I’d seen it causing bsods
I don’t know if this is related, but none of the third party docks I could find offered full resolution, full refresh rate, multi-monitor output, as the official dock can offer.
Every dock I looked at with a decent number of reviews either had 1 star reviews mentioning monitor connection problems and/or docks dying shortly after purchase, too, but it’s hard to know if that’s relevant or just the baseline noise of electronics failure rates/user error.
I just ended up eating the cost (and long shipping times) to get the official one.