Baseus Spacemate USB-C dock review: Too clever for its own good
At a glance
Expert's Rating
Pros
Well designed, compact
Unique screen-lock button and icons
Keeps itself cool
Attractive price
Can power three displays
Cons
Subpar performance
Three 4K displays only work at 30Hz
Doesn’t pass much power to a laptop
Our Verdict
The Baseus Spacemate 11-in-1 Docking Station includes some quirks you might just love, but its subpar performance hurts its chances.
The Baseus Spacemate 11-in-1 Docking Station (BS-OH137) doesn’t seem like the best idea: a generic USB-C docking station capable of three 4K displays isn’t really feasible on paper. In the real world it’s a more practical solution than you might think, but I still wouldn’t advise pushing this dock to its limits.
Put simply, the Basus Spacemate offers the possibility of connecting three 4K displays at 4K resolution, but only at 30Hz apiece. That’s not especially comfortable to work with for long periods, so it’s probably better to think of this dock as a more conventional USB-C dock capable of connecting to just two 4K displays, provided that you have the right hardware. A few interesting gimmicks — a lock-screen button, light-up port icons, and a sticky-pad stand — add some wrinkles.
This is another dock that use Display Stream Compression (DSC), a technology found in HDMI 2.1-capable devices like laptops with Nvidia GeForce 3000-series discrete GPUs but also modern hardware like Intel 13th-gen Core chips and above. It’s visually lossless, which means that you won’t notice the compression algorithms taking effect. If your laptop is DSC-enabled, you’ll be able to connect three 4K displays at 30Hz, or two at 60Hz; if you don’t have DSC, you’ll be able to connect two 4K displays at 30Hz or one at 60Hz.