Review: Another USB-C Hub from Mokin - 14-in-1

The lovely people at Mokin keep sending me their USB-C hubs to review, and I'm happy to do so. They work splendidly with my Linux and Windows machines, and they provide more ports than I ever thought necessary.

This one is positively festooned with extra ports. Let's take a look.

USB-C

Plug your power adapter into the hub, and then the hub into your laptop. With most hubs, that's it; you've lost a C port. This has an extra USB-C port - so you don't lose anything. Personally, I'd prefer more USB-C ports.

Instead, you get 3x USB-A 3.0 ports, and 2x USB-A 2.0 ports. That's a lot of room for peripherals. They're all well spaced out, so you should be able to cram everything in.

Storage

All these sorts of hubs tend to have an SD slot and a microSD slot. Read and write speeds hit the limit of the cards I had - but you may be better off using the USB 3 ports if you really need speed. Speaking of which...

Speed

Obviously, if you have a hundred gadgets plugged in - and only one USB-C cable - there's a limit to the total throughput. That said, the Ethernet port topped out my 650Mbps broadband - and I don't have anything much faster than that!

Video

There are two HDMI ports and a legacy VGA port. I'll be honest, I can't remember the last time I needed to plug my laptop into an analogue video cable. But I guess if you go to lots of crappy conference venues it might be useful?

My old laptop was able to drive two monitors at the same time, which was pretty useful. You're limited to one at 4k@60Hz - if you're using two HDMI, you'll only get 30Hz. But if you're happy with 1080p, you'll get 60Hz on both.

Apparently MacOS doesn't support triple display.

Power

USB's Power Delivery mode is a still a bit confusing. I used a 100W Dell charger and, USB-C PD tester saw that about 80% of the power was making it to the laptop.

With the power unplugged, the hub drew electricity from the laptop in order to charge all the gadgets.

Sound

Weirdly, the analogue sound out didn't show up for me in Linux. I'm not heartbroken by that - either my laptop has a speaker out or the HDMI device does. But it is a bit weird that it didn't show.

Linux info

As with all modern devices, it is plug-and-play. All my gadgets worked fine with it. This is what Linux sees:

ID 0bda:8153 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8153 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
ID 2109:0817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB3.0 Hub             
ID 2109:0817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB3.0 Hub 
ID 1a40:0801 Terminus Technology Inc. USB 2.0 Hub
2109:8817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB Billboard Device   
ID 2109:2817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB2.0 Hub             
ID 2109:2817 VIA Labs, Inc. USB2.0 Hub  

Verdict

There's a lot packed into a fairly small box. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you'll pay about £60 on Amazon for it.

It's a neat little halfway house between a small adapter with a couple of ports and a massive docking station. But if you don't need all those ports, there's probably something cheaper.

I guess this is aimed at people plugging in to all sorts of weird screens on their travels. I think a DisplayPort would have been a better choice than double HDMI.

So a bit of a mixed bag. If you need these options, it is close to perfect. But it may be excessive for some.

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