iVANKY FusionDock Ultra Review – 26 Ports, 10GbE and a Dual-Cable Design for the Mac Desk

Accessory Review

by Nino LeitnerToday

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I constantly run out of ports on my MacBook Pro. My desk is full of RAIDs, card readers for various camera memory cards, an iodyne Pro Data and two high-resolution monitors, and every single one of them wants a cable. The iVANKY FusionDock Ultra promises to take all of that off the laptop: 26 ports, 10GbE, two host connections and up to four native displays on the right Mac. I put it to work on my M2 Max MacBook Pro, with card offloads, a 10GbE NAS and two monitors, and for a desk like mine, it is the perfect companion.

The FusionDock Ultra sits at the top of iVANKY’s FusionDock line, above the FusionDock Max 1 and Max 2. We first covered the company back in 2020 with a USB-C dock for dual 4K displays on the MacBook Pro, and displays are still the reason this dock exists. iVANKY puts two dock controllers into one housing and connects both of them to the Mac with two cables. The result is made for Apple silicon Macs only, running macOS 15.1 or later. It does not work with Windows PCs, Chromebooks or Intel Macs. This is not a full lab review; it’s my experience with the dock in my own edit setup, plus a set of measurements on the card reader and the network port.

Two cables, two chips

iVANKY calls it a “Dual-Chip architecture.” Each of the two host ports feeds its own controller, and each controller serves its own group of ports, including one of the two rows of display outputs on the back. The included cable ends in two USB-C plugs that snap together magnetically. On a MacBook Pro, they go into the two ports on the left side as one unit; on a Mac mini or Mac Studio, you pull them apart to reach ports that sit further apart.

The price for this is obvious: the FusionDock Ultra is not a one-cable dock, and it takes two of the three Thunderbolt ports on my MacBook Pro. For a laptop that lives on a desk most of the time, I can live with that, because the Mac’s own HDMI port, SD slot and the right-hand Thunderbolt port stay free. If you dock and undock several times a day, the magnetic plug at least turns two plugs into one movement.

On paper, the dock runs at up to 80Gbps in both directions and up to 120Gbps in one direction for display-heavy work. My M2 Max has Thunderbolt 4 with 40Gbps per port, so I could not test those modes. What I can say is that the dock works without problems on a Thunderbolt 4 Mac. iVANKY’s own FAQ recommends a Mac with 120Gbps support for the best results, which today means a MacBook Pro with M5 Pro or M5 Max or another Mac with Thunderbolt 5. In the box, you also get a 240W power adapter. If you buy the dock from iVANKY’s own website, you get a separate 1.2m Thunderbolt 5 cable as an exclusive extra; Amazon orders do not include it.

26 ports, and most of them where they belong

The front carries the ports that you plug in and out all day: six 10Gbps USB-C ports, a seventh 10Gbps USB-C port with 45W power delivery for a phone or tablet, two 10Gbps USB-A ports, a 3.5mm headset jack, and an SD 4.0 and a microSD 4.0 card slot, both UHS-II. Everything is clearly labeled, which matters more than you’d think with this many holes in one box.

The back holds the two host ports, four downstream USB-C ports at 80/120Gbps with 15W each, a DisplayPort 2.1 output, an HDMI 2.0 output, one more 10Gbps USB-C port, two more USB-A ports, the 10GbE port, an optical audio output, separate 3.5mm audio in and out, the DC input and a lock slot. All 12 regular USB ports run at 10Gbps; there is no slow USB 2.0 port hiding anywhere.

My one layout wish: all four fast downstream ports are on the back. For my iodyne Pro Data, which stays connected anyway, that’s fine. For a fast CFexpress reader that I plug in several times a day, one 80Gbps port at the front would be much nicer. And while I’m at it (iVANKY, if you’re reading this): a CFexpress Type B slot on the next “Ultra” would turn a great dock for filmmakers into the perfect one.

Displays: your Mac sets the limit

The FusionDock Ultra drives displays natively, without DisplayLink drivers or compression. That also means it cannot give your Mac more displays than Apple allows. According to iVANKY, an M5 Max MacBook Pro can use any four of the six video outputs on the back. M1 to M4 Max machines also get four displays, but they must be split two and two across the upper and lower row of ports. An M5 Pro gets three.

My M2 Max is one of the Max machines. During all of my tests, an ultrawide 5K monitor ran from one of the downstream USB-C ports, and right now two screens run from the dock without problems. There is one detail worth checking, though: Apple specifies four displays on the M2 Max as three over Thunderbolt plus one on the Mac’s own HDMI port. Through the dock, all four come over Thunderbolt. A full four-display test is still on my list. For the record, our 13-inch MacBook Air with M5 has the same dock limits as without it: two external displays, full stop.

Two more notes for monitor shoppers. The HDMI port is HDMI 2.0, so for high-refresh or ultrawide panels, the DisplayPort 2.1 output or the USB-C ports are the better choice. And if you run an LG UltraFine 5K or a Samsung ViewFinity S9 5K, iVANKY supports a maximum of two of them, one per row. The other video outputs on that row then carry data only.

The SD card reader: faster than the Mac’s own slot

Card offloading is where a dock like this earns its place on my desk, so I tested the built-in SD reader with three UHS-II cards: a Panasonic V90 64GB, an Angelbird AV Pro SD V60 512GB and a Lexar Professional 2000x 128GB. In Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the Lexar reached 264MB/s write and 263MB/s read, which is right where it should be.

I also ran a scripted test with repeated 1GB transfers on all three cards. Reads came in at 273 to 280MB/s and writes at about 145MB/s, which is what these cards can do in a good UHS-II reader.

For comparison, I put the Panasonic card into my MacBook Pro’s own SD slot. It read at 253MB/s there, and at up to 280MB/s in the dock. So the dock’s reader is not a compromise; it is actually the faster slot on my desk, and it leaves the Mac’s own slot free for a second card.

CFexpress through the dock

There is no CFexpress slot, so my external card reader stays on the desk: the Angelbird CFexpress Type B performance card reader, connected to the dock. I tested an Angelbird AV Pro CFexpress Type A 800GB card, read through an adapter in the same reader, and an Angelbird AV Pro SE CFexpress Type B 256GB card. The Type A card wrote at 816MB/s and read at 807MB/s, and the Type B card wrote at 1,054MB/s and read at 808MB/s.

Both cards are rated much faster than that, and a read speed of about 800MB/s is typical for a 10Gbps USB connection. So the limit here is a 10Gbps link, in the reader or in the port, not the cards. If you want full CFexpress Type B speed through this dock, use a 40Gbps reader on one of the four fast ports on the back.

10GbE that you can actually use

The built-in 10GbE port is a big reason to look at this dock if you edit from a NAS. Our NAS is a Synology DS1821+ with 10GbE. One practical lesson first: when I plugged the dock into my router, macOS showed a 1000baseT link, because that router port only runs at 1Gbps. You can check this under System Settings, Network, Details, Hardware. Connected to a 10Gb switch, the link came up at 10Gbase-T.

The second lesson: my NAS shares were still mounted over Wi-Fi, because macOS keeps a network share on the interface where it was first connected. Turn Wi-Fi off (or move the dock’s Ethernet port above Wi-Fi in the network service order), then eject and reconnect the shares. After that, a 5GB test file wrote to the NAS at a median of 573MB/s (up to 580MB/s) and read at a median of 719MB/s (up to 773MB/s). A 10GbE link can carry about 1,100MB/s, so in my setup, the NAS and the SMB protocol set the limit, not the dock. Either way, that’s more than seven times what a Gigabit port can do.

Power, cooling and the small things

The dock delivers up to 140W to the Mac over USB Power Delivery 3.1, plus 45W from the front USB-C port, 15W from each of the four fast ports and 7.5W from the other USB ports. Everything runs from an external 240W power supply. If you use bus-powered SSDs that draw a lot of power, give them one of the four fast ports.

Inside, two adaptive fans handle cooling. iVANKY says they stay off or very slow under light load and only ramp up under sustained heavy work, and it rates them at 44 to 46dBA, measured at a distance of 1cm. In practice, I don’t hear the dock at all, and our office is quite a quiet place. As I write this, it drives two screens, three SSDs, an SD card and the Ethernet connection, all copying data between each other. For studios that need complete silence, iVANKY itself points to the fanless FusionDock Max 1. There is no power button, so the dock is on as long as it is plugged in.

Who is it for?

The FusionDock Ultra is not a dock for everyone, and iVANKY’s pricing makes sure of that. If you have a MacBook Air with one monitor and a mouse, a much cheaper dock will do. And if you want a single-cable Thunderbolt 5 dock that also works on Windows, the OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock with dual HDMI is one alternative.

But if your desk looks like mine, with RAIDs, card readers, a NAS and several monitors on a Max-chip MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio, this is a device that was missing. Most of the small adapters that you buy online without thinking twice (for example, those little Thunderbolt adapters that also read SD cards and add a few USB-A ports) give you slow speeds. With the FusionDock Ultra, I basically get full speed on every port, without a second thought. I don’t want to miss this dock on my desk anymore.

Price and availability (and discount for CineD readers)

The iVANKY FusionDock Ultra has a regular price of $749.99. During iVANKY’s Black Friday promotion, which runs until November 30, 2026, it costs $599.99 in the US and £599.99 in the UK. According to iVANKY, that is 20% off and $50 below the lowest price of the year so far.

In the iVANKY online store, you don’t need a code: the discount is applied automatically at checkout, and this is also the only place where the extra Thunderbolt 5 cable comes in the box. On Amazon US and Amazon UK, you get the same price with the code FORCINED, which works from November 7, 2026 (Pacific Time). B&H lists the dock for $649, currently out of stock with a restock expected on November 19. CVP does not list the dock yet. iVANKY gives a two-year warranty.

How many ports does your edit desk really need, and would you give up two Thunderbolt ports for a dock like this? Let me know in the comments below!