Belkin Connect 6-in-1 Core GaN 130W USB-C Dock review

The Belkin 6-in-1 USB-C dock is designed for home office and workplaces, providing an all-in-one solution for charging, port extension and display hook up.

The Belkin 6-in-1 is a GaN dock, which means it uses Gallium Nitride chips instead of silicon. Gallium Nitride allows more efficient power transfer than silicon, which enables manufacturers to produce high powered charging devices with smaller form factors than equivalent silicone devices.

As such, the 6-in-1 dock is super compact, making it ideal for busy desks or minimalist setups.

This is by no means a power user dock. Headline specs are relatively unimpressive, as docks go, and its variety of ports is limited. Nor is it suitable for gamers.

However, for its intended purpose, it’s a good little dock that I’ve found ideal for decluttering my desk and hooking up my laptop when working from home.

Is it right for you? Find out in my full Belkin USB-C 6-in-1 Core GaN Dock

Belkin Connect 6-in-1 Core GaN 130W USB-C Dock review: Specs

Belkin Connect 6-in-1 Core GaN 130W USB-C Dock review: The ups

Thanks to its Gallium Nitride power supply, the Belkin 6-in-1 delivers strong charging performance in a very compact body, making it perfect for tidying up busy desks while extending your number of ports.

Small and compact

The Belkin 6-in-1 dock uses a Gallium Nitride (GaN) power supply. Gallium nitride transfers power more efficiently than silicon, allowing manufacturers to shrink the size of power supply units versus silicon units, while delivering an equivalent power delivery rate.

This means that the 6-in-1 dock is pleasantly compact, at just over 3-inches square. It’s taller than the dock I use for my photography workstation, the Belkin Connect 11-in-1 dock, but the 6-in-1’s footprint is much smaller, helping keep my desk feeling clutter free.

It’s quite heavy — surprisingly so, given its diminutive size — but I was nevertheless able to mount it on the side of my laptop stand using some 3M double-sided tape, so it isn’t that heavy.

I’ll cover the ports in more detail later, but this has effectively extended my ports when using my work laptop by 1x USB-C and 2x USB-A., with minimal impact or clutter.

96W GaN pass through charging

My work laptop is ageing, and its battery is not long left for this world. It’s been useful having such a powerful charging dock to keep the battery juiced up and prevent my laptop from cutting out.

The 6-in-1 dock’s 130W power supply offers 96W pass-through to a laptop via its side USB-C host port, which is more than enough for most laptops.

The frontal USB-C port and USB-A ports offer 7.5W each, which isn’t great, but is fine to keep phones and small peripherals charged during or between uses.

Decent enough data speeds

While not exactly earth-shattering, the Belkin 6-in-1 GaN dock offers decent enough transfer speeds for general productivity and office use. At the rear of the dock sits a 1 gigabyte per second (Gbps) Ethernet port, for relatively quick internet connectivity.

This is as much as the Anker 675 USB-C dock, which also offers Gigabit Ethernet. If you want faster speeds, though — for example if you’re uploading and downloading large files like videos to/from the cloud regularly — the Belkin 11-in-1 USB-C offers 2.5 Gbps speeds.

5 GBps transfer speeds through the USB ports are, again, relatively good for general workplace or home office use. This will allow you to transfer everyday files between devices quickly.

Power users or those in the creative industries transferring large files to/from storage devices, will instead want a dock with a Thunderbolt 4 or 5 port, as these offer transfer speeds of up to 80Gbps (Thunderbolt 5), like the Asus Master Thunderbolt 5 dock.

The Belkin 6-in-1 isn’t designed (or indeed priced) for hardcore creatives, though, and for general workplace productivity, it does the job.

4K/60Hz monitor support

With its HDMI 2.1 port, the Belkin 6-in-1 can support a single 4K UHD monitor, running at up to 60Hz. Again, this is nothing to lose your mind over, but it does mean you can continue to use your beautiful 4K monitor for work by simply switching over inputs.

If you want a dock that can handle gaming monitors with higher refresh rates, check out the Razer USB 4 dock instead.

Belkin Connect 6-in-1 Core GaN 130W USB-C Dock review: The downs

The Belkin USB-C 6-in-1 Core GaN dock is designed primarily with compactness and general productivity in mind, which means it has its drawbacks. The primary issue is a lack of ports, which may prove frustrating even to home office users.

Lack of ports

I’ve touched on a few issues already in the ‘Ups’ section above, but so far these have just been buying considerations. This is a relatively affordable dock, to tidy up the desks of general productivity users in the workplace or in a home office. So it kinda figures that it doesn’t have 80Gbps transfer speeds, 2.5Gbps Ethernet or +60Hz refresh rate support.

The thing is, I find the amount of ports very limiting, even for light productivity use. There are two USB-C ports, one of which is the host, leaving you with a single spare USB-C. Given one of my laptops’s USB-C ports is going to be taken up by either way for charging, either via its adapter or the dock’s host cable, I’m technically getting a port back, but it isn’t extending my USB-C ports otherwise.

Most of my tech is USB-C, so I’ve found it really limiting having only a single such port on the dock. There are two USB-A ports, but I’ve genuinely had to root around in my cable bag to find compatible USB-C cables at times.

Then there’s the monitor support. There’s only a single HDMI port. I know plenty of people who run multiple monitor setups for work, even if they aren’t power users, so it would’ve been nice to see a second display hookup.

Finally, there are no other handy ports, such as an SD/MicroSD reader or headphone jack. The Belkin 11-in-1 USB-C dock offers all of the above, plus two HDMI ports, a VGA port (for older monitors) and two USB-C ports (one PD charging only, the other a data transfer port).

Belkin Connect 6-in-1 Core GaN 130W USB-C Dock review: Verdict

The Belkin USB-C 6-in-1 Core GaN dock isn’t a bad product. It primarily serves to clean up cluttered desks by utilizing GaN technology to offer powerful 96W charging in a compact form. Its data transfer and Ethernet speeds are fine, and it supports 4K monitors at up to 60Hz, making it a decent product for single-monitor workplace or home office setups.

It’s really difficult to recommend it over the Belkin 11-in-1 USB-C dock, though, which I recently reviewed. The 11-in-1 dock offers more of everything: faster transfer and Ethernet speeds, more expansion ports and multiple monitor hookup. As long as you have the extra $60 to spare.

Still, if all you want is a simple dock for basic productivity needs, you can do a lot worse than the Belkin 6-in-1.