Update 10/7/22: Added in that the Valve dock comes with a power supply as well. Thank you @rgreening for point this out!
With Valve surprise announcing their official Steam Deck dock, it was only a matter of time before someone would retort, and JSAUX is that company! Today, the new dock was put for sale and is poised to be a direct rival to the Valve!
With the dock from Valve officially released, we were able to get a finalized list of the tech specs for it, which included 3 USB 3.1 ports, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, and a gigabit ethernet port. All of this together in a very small form factor comes to $90 and can be bought on Steam.
Compared to what was available yesterday, the cheapest dock with almost all of these features was the JSAUX Upgraded Dock for $50 which had everything except the DisplayPort. So, JSAUX decided to release their version of the dock, the 3rd Docking Station, which comes with the DisplayPort and is priced at $60. This would be the most on-par dock to the Valve official one that is currently available, so a comparison between these two is inevitable.
There are a couple key differences though that will set these two apart. Firstly, the JSAUX dock uses DisplayPort 1.2 while Valve's dock uses 1.4. There a couple key differences between them, which is neatly wrapped up in this table here from satechi.net:
When talking to JSAUX about the decision, they mentioned that in their testing, higher refresh rate isn't supported as well yet. This would mean full utilization of 1.4 may not be possible according to their tests.
There is also a big aesthetic difference too. The Valve dock is significantly smaller with the ethernet port being on the back and tight port placement, while the JSAUX dock is bigger with more spread out ports and the ethernet being on the side. This could be a make or break to some when it comes to port placement. There is no word yet on how either will handle hard-shell cases either, but as we are getting both of these docks soon, we will be able to report.
The Valve dock does come with an extra power supply as well, which is a $25 value. While we could subtract this and say it’s closer to a $65 to $60 comparison, you can only get the Valve dock with the power supply included. So regardless of whether you want another power supply or not, it will still cost $90.
With a $30 difference, this could be a game changer for a lot of others on the fence about the dock from Valve!
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You forgot to mention that JSAUX has three USB 3.0 ports, not 3.1.
USB 3.0 is USB 3.1 Gen 1 (super confusing). I will update the article to explain this though!