Setup & Benchmarks
Club 3D’s MST hub doesn’t need any drivers so it is fully plug and play. All you need is a DisplayPort 1.1 or above and your graphics card driver will take care of the rest. You might need to hit the scan button on the rear for it to detect the displays, but other than that it’s just connecting.
The Y-cabled docking station does need one driver for the network connection, that is at least if you don’t already have Realtek Gigabit Ethernet drivers installed. Once that’s done we can benchmark several aspects of this device, namely the network and USB connections. I’ll of course test both these options and compare them to the baseline performance of the test system’s onboard devices.
Test System
- Supermicro C7Z97-OCE motherboard
- Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
- Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1866MHz
- EVGA GTX 980 SC / HIS IceQ X2 HD7870
- Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
- Angelbird SSD2go Pocket USB 3.0 SSD
Network Performance
I’ll be using the LAN Speed Test application to test the total throughput with ten 1GB packets. This will allow the line to get to its maximum potential and give us comparable static throughput results that we can compare.
The network performance in the device is right on track and the built-in Realtek network chip does a great job at keeping up with my onboard Intel LAN. At times, it even peaks past it and beats the onboard speeds.
USB Performance
I’ll be testing the USB with three of the most common benchmark apps, ATTO, AS SSD, and CrystalDiskMark. This will give a good view on the hub’s performance and especially the impact the hub can have on the traffic speed. I’m using the same onboard USB 3.0 port for both tests to ensure stability in the tests.
There was a minor impact on the performance as it was to be expected, but not much and nothing you’ll notice in real-world scenarios. The minor drop is natural based on the fact that the data has to pass through one more device on its route to the target, but it really is minor.
