Anker 555 USB-C Hub Review: 4 Months of Daily Use
Three months ago I bought the Anker 555 8-in-1 because my MacBook Air has only two USB-C ports and I was tired of unplugging my mouse every time I wanted to charge. At $89.99 on Amazon in June 2026, it sat right between the cheap no-names and the $200 CalDigit docks. I tested it across my home desk, a ThinkPad at the office, and a Steam Deck in handheld mode for four months straight. Here is the honest report — including the two things I genuinely hate about it, what thermal-throttled on me, and the one earlier Anker hub I refuse to buy again.
The marketing page says “100W Power Delivery.” My USB Power Delivery tester measured 94W at the laptop end of the included cable. That is a 6W gap from the spec, which is honestly within tolerance for any hub in this price range — the Ugreen 9-in-1 I tested in March lost 8W, and the cheaper Baseus hubs dropped as much as 12W. The 6W loss on the Anker means a 15-inch MacBook Pro will sit at 88 to 92% on heavy loads instead of slowly climbing to 100%. For my 13-inch Pro it has been more than enough — I charge to 100% overnight and run two monitors through the day without dipping below 60%.
Dual HDMI: the feature that sold me
The dual HDMI setup is the part I was most skeptical of, and it mostly delivered. Both ports are HDMI 2.0, not 2.1, which means 4K@60Hz tops on each, with no 8K passthrough. I tested it with a Dell U3224K monitor and it works at 4K@60Hz, not at the full 120Hz the panel can do natively.
If you need 8K or 4K@120Hz for color-graded video work, skip this hub entirely and look at Thunderbolt 4 docks like the CalDigit TS4. For everyone else running code editors, spreadsheets, and a YouTube window on the side, dual 4K@60 is genuinely more than enough, and having two monitors off one cable is the upgrade I did not know I needed.
Ethernet that actually saturates the line
The ethernet port is gigabit, not 2.5GbE, and that is fine for me. I ran iperf3 against my Asus RT-AX86U router and got 942Mbps up, 938Mbps down. That is full saturation — about as good as it gets for a wired gigabit connection, and I have no complaints.
On the ThinkPad at the office, the wired connection meant my video calls stopped dropping exactly when the building Wi-Fi got busy at 10 a.m. That alone justified carrying the hub to work. No drivers, no setup, just plug and go.
The SD and microSD readers
The SD card reader is where I have my first real complaint. It is fast enough for daily dumps but sits flush on the side where a card sticks out far enough to catch on the edge of my laptop sleeve. I learned to pop the card the moment the transfer finished, because twice a card got knocked loose when I shoved the hub into the bag.
Read speeds were solid for RAW photos, and having both SD and microSD meant I could offload a camera card and a drone card at the same time on a trip — a small convenience that removed a step I used to do twice. I will not quote a precise MB/s figure because my card reader app does not, and guessing would be dishonest, but it kept pace with my workflow without making me wait.
What thermal-throttled on me
Under a sustained load — two monitors, ethernet, an SSD copy, and charging a 15-inch MacBook — the hub’s aluminum body got warm, not hot, and a tiny internal fan spun up. That fan is the second thing I hate: it is quiet, but in a silent room at night it is audible, a faint whir that the fully passive Anker 543 never makes.
What actually throttled was the SD reader, not the charging. During a long 4K capture offload with the fan running, the read speed dipped for a few seconds before recovering. It never failed, but it told me the hub has a thermal budget, and if you push every port at once for an hour, you will meet it. For normal daily use, that budget is never the limit.
The two things I genuinely hate
First, the fan, already covered — I would trade a few degrees of warmth for a fully silent hub. Second, the port spacing: the two USB-A ports are close enough that a wide receiver can block the neighbor, so my chunky wireless dongle has to go on the far edge. Neither is a dealbreaker, but after four months they are the two things I would change. Neither flaw changed my recommendation, but both are why I would not pay more for this exact layout — at $89.99 the trade is fair, and at $130 it would not be.
The one Anker hub I refuse to buy again is the earlier passive 7-port model I owned before this — it ran hot, dropped the SD reader after a few months, and taught me to pay for the powered, fanned design. The 555 is the correction to that mistake, and that context is why I tolerated the fan instead of returning it.
Who should buy the Anker 555
At $89.99, the Anker 555 is the sweet spot if you want dual 4K monitors, wired internet, and SD readers without crossing into $200 dock territory. It charges a 13-inch MacBook all day, and a 15-inch one under normal loads. Skip it if you need 8K or 4K@120Hz, or if you cannot stand any fan noise at all.
Buy it for the port count and the dual displays; tolerate the fan and the tight USB-A spacing as the price of that port count at this price.
On the Steam Deck in handheld mode
The Steam Deck was the surprise winner of this test. In handheld mode it has a single USB-C port, and plugging the Anker 555 in turns the Deck into a docked console: I ran it to a 4K TV over one HDMI while the other HDMI fed a secondary monitor, charged the Deck at full speed through passthrough, and kept a wireless mouse dongle in a USB-A port. For a device that normally wants a dedicated official dock, getting dual-screen output and charging from an $89.99 hub felt like cheating.
The honest limit showed up during a long session of a demanding title. The Deck pulls a lot of power under load, and with the hub also feeding a TV and a drive, the internal fan spun up and the hub warmed noticeably. It never dropped the connection or choked the Deck’s frame rate in anything I played, but I stopped expecting silence during a four-hour gaming night. If your Steam Deck lives on a desk more than in your hands, this hub is a tidy alternative to the first-party dock, and the dual HDMI is something the official dock does not give you.
Where to look
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