Processing:
The IcyBox is made entirely of plastic, partly matt, partly in piano black finish. She looks solid and stable seated in the socket, if you want to use this. The power supply is a bit thick. A deficiency is the rather short USB 3.0 cable (1m). Here a longer cable would make sense, especially since the first renewals in USB 3.0 cables like lead to strong performance losses.
The front of the device, I personally find not optimally managed. I would have made the labels discreet and designed the LED either modern or omitted entirely.
Installation:
The installation of the CD behaves as expected. The Startup to display the setup, this includes the active applications that conflict with the installation. Strangely, even the Avira Antivirus is terminated. Since a USB video card is installed in the ICY BOX, displaying falls repeatedly from short and installed the new video driver.
Use:
The built-in graphics card to perform better than expected. I know several USB VGA / HDMI and DVI versions, but the ICY BOX here offers the best performance ever! The transmission works very quickly and so far without any failures or graphical errors. I have next to the simple connection of a monitor via HDMI or DVI also tested the cumulative use of two monitors and even this works well at a resolution of 1920x1080. The display on the second monitor moves to something that is due to the bandwidth of the connection. To drive two displays with high resolution and high refresh rate is a challenge that even the most high-class master USB 2 DVI-VGA or HDMI adapter no better.
The built-in sound card is directly detected and selected as the default. I close the Icy Box from, the device is of course separately and the standard goes back to the previous sound card. There is of course still the possibility the standard input and output to be defined in deviation from the Control Panel. The sound is good for a standard sound card, the output power is very high, so if you can hear through headphones you need to be careful to keep to an absolute minimum the volume, otherwise there is a sudden deafness! For the output on boxing this is of course an advantage.
All USB ports (two front, four rear) languages as expected immediately. On the back, it may create a bottleneck for thicker USB sticks by the close arrangement of the terminals, it would be questionable to connect four USB sticks side by side. The connectors are of course meant peripherals such as printers, scanners, external hard drives, connect mouse keyboard and for the design is optimal. One may well dissipate in a cable conduit cable through the narrow arrangement, if required, which counteracts the cable mess. The front USB ports are installed with sufficient distance so that here no mutual interference of devices can be expected. Worth mentioning, I find that the front connectors therefore are optimized for charging mobile phones etc. the print: Fast Charge. Mir is not a known standard called the minimum amperage for this, but the equipment load quite quickly, similar to a 2A charger the real amperage is hard to figure out.
When LAN port is a Gigabit connection. The network card is displayed immediately after installation and it works well.
Conclusion:
Who chooses the ICY BOX as docking station certainly does nothing wrong, it meets all requirements optimally here and is well worth its price. Of course you have to make sure that your notebook has a USB port 3-0, because with USB 2.0 provides the performance of lean.
If you use the ICY BOX for the PC it is a successful enlargement! It makes it possible to extend the monitor landscape and allowed even with weak power supplies in PC powerful USB connections. I had the problem that I could not connect directly to a weak power supply and many components my external hard drive and had to use an active USB hub. This will also be replaced by the ICY BOX now.
So I can only recommend buying the Icy Box.