Thunderbolt 5 Dock Showdown: Anker Prime TB5 vs CalDigit TS5

Thunderbolt 5 docks are starting to decide how your desk actually works, from power delivery to how many high-resolution screens you can run at once. If you spend long hours culling, editing, and tethered to a laptop on photography jobs, you are dealing with the same pain points that photographers run into when a dock chokes their storage or display setup.

Coming to you from Art Suwansang, this detailed video walks through two new Thunderbolt 5 docks, the Anker Prime TB5 Docking Station and the CalDigit TS5. Suwansang starts by handling the Anker cube-style dock, showing how the built-in power supply keeps everything to a single box and a lightweight C7 power cable, similar to what you use with a Mac mini or Apple TV. You see the layout up close: front USB-A and USB-C at 10 Gb/s, a headphone jack, card readers on the side, and on the back, 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, more USB type A, plus dedicated HDMI and DisplayPort outputs for non-USB-C displays. Suwansang also shows how the dock stacks neatly with a Mac Studio, which matters when your photo desk is already crowded with drives and card readers. The size lines up closely with a compact desktop footprint, so you can park it beside a small machine instead of hiding it somewhere awkward.

The comparison shifts when Suwansang rotates to the CalDigit tower-style design with its passive aluminum cooling and external power brick. You see the braided Thunderbolt 5 cable, the larger C5 power lead like an Apple Studio Display, and the added bulk that brings under the desk or in a bag. On the TS5 front panel, there are microSD and SD slots, twin USB-C ports with different power limits, and another headphone jack, so you need to remember which front USB-C can actually fast charge a phone or tablet. Around the back, Suwansang points out the mixed-speed USB type A ports, another USB-C, 2.5 Gbps Ethernet, analog audio, and four Thunderbolt ports, one reserved for the host. You might be surprised how much that external brick and extra cabling changes which dock actually feels cleaner once everything is wired up. That extra Thunderbolt port is a real advantage if you run multiple fast drives or a daisy-chained monitor setup.

Where the video gets especially useful is in the live testing. Suwansang plugs both docks into a 16-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Max and uses an inline USB-C power meter to see how close each one comes to the 140 W headline number. He then sets up a 27-inch 5K BenQ PD2730S and a fast external NVMe SSD, first plugged directly into the laptop and then routed through each dock, so you can compare real-world read and write speeds. Both units keep performance in the same ballpark as a direct connection even while driving the 5K screen and charging the laptop, which tells you these TB5 docks are not adding a bottleneck to your file transfers. You get to watch the numbers fluctuate under load instead of just reading spec sheets.

What Suwansang keeps coming back to is how the ports and power behavior affect daily use. With the Anker Prime TB5 Docking Station, every USB-A port runs at 10 Gb/s and the two front USB-C ports simply share a generous power pool, so you do not have to memorize a port map when you plug in card readers, bus-powered drives, or a phone. The CalDigit TS5 gives you an extra Thunderbolt output but asks you to think more about which USB port handles high-speed storage and which one is better left to a keyboard or receiver. If you travel with a laptop and want one compact block you can drop into a bag alongside a camera body and a couple of lenses, the Anker’s integrated power supply and smaller footprint stand out. If your setup is more permanent and you are already running several Thunderbolt devices, the CalDigit layout may still be tempting. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Suwansang.