did you know that your mouse isn't getting the bandwidth you need to be the
best gamer you can be we love when manufacturers tell us what we need thank
you mr business i'm sure your infinite wisdom is looking out for all of our
best interests just kidding over the years marketing
has tried anything they can think of to get you to buy their new product
oh my god and when asrock came out with their new riptide motherboards featuring
lightning gaming ports for your high polling rate mouse and keyboard
we just had to find out if it was real we know our sponsor norm pass is real
store your passwords in a single place and log into your favorite websites with
just a click keep your information safe with the nordpass password manager learn
more at nordpass.com Linus
now first things first we don't expect these ports to matter usb 3.0 has a
couple things going for it full duplex data transfer and max speeds of 5
gigabit this means it can send signals back and forth at the same time and it
can do so very quickly this has been great for modern hardware as we plug in
more and more devices that use more and more data but how much data does a mouse
or keyboard actually use well a standard mouse sends about a three byte packet
every time it's pulled to calculate position and whether or not a button is
being pressed if your polling rate is let's say 1 000 hertz that's 3 000 bytes
of data every second to some this may seem like a lot but remember that even
usb 2.0 which we've had since april of 2000 has a theoretical max signaling
rate of around 60 megabytes if a 1000 hertz mouse is sending less than three
kilobytes of data per second which is absolutely nowhere close to the max
signaling rate why do we even care meet razer's viper 8 kilohertz where is it
yeah there it is this is one of the very few eight kilohertz
mice on the market now just like your monitor having a high refresh rate is
good for getting the edge over your opponent a higher polling rate mouse and keyboard are too the higher the rate the
lower the click to photon latency you should experience now this particular
mouse boasts about a .125 millisecond
motion and click latency making your actions even more near instant than with
a traditional thousand hertz gaming mouse the jump to eight kilohertz makes
our data usage shoot up to 24 kilobytes per second but that's still well under
our usb limits even if we add an 8 kilohertz keyboard on top of our 8
kilohertz mouse and double the data rate to 48 kilobytes per second we're still
well within limits and most newer devices these days are
using usb 3.0 later anyway with newer motherboards having increasingly robust
i o featuring multiple 3.0 ports however
the issue lies not with the ports or the cables but with the usb controller
present on each board data comes in from your device through a cable to the usb
port then to the controller and CPU the maximum bandwidth is usually a little
under what the theoretical maximum of the cable is with most controllers
getting around 400 megabytes per second in 3.0 if you have only one controller
eventually all of that traffic is going to add up depending on how many devices
you have connected and what they're doing but even if you have a file transferring to
a thumb drive maybe you're writing data to a dvd or blu-ray burner there's a mic
hooked up to recording audio sound being output to a headset chances are you're
still fine hooking up your fast gaming peripherals and
using cable ties from ltteststore.com not according to asrock though
meet the riptide this is the x570 model
and it's a decent board for the price ddr4 up to 5000 megahertz 10 phase vrm
three pci express slots lots of SATA and m.2 ports yep it's a modern board all
right however what we're interested in are the lightning gaming ports here and
here for your mouse and keyboard specifically let me read you the little description they have on their website
patent pending of course aimed for die-hard gamers and enthusiasts
lightning gaming ports are sourced from two different controller interfaces that
allow gamers to connect their high speed mice and keyboard with the lowest jitter
latency and win the best performance they've even got a little graphic to
show what they mean here having two controllers sounds cool and
it might be a feature we'll see come back more often in the future but marketing it as a gaming gimmick is
dumb with modern cpus and usb 3.0 or greater
polling rate issues are simply a thing of the past we got kyle one of our
engineers to solder on the connections needed for our ldap system from NVIDIA
and check the click to photon latency using the fastest mouse and keyboard we
have at eight kilohertz and four kilohertz respectively speaking of
keyboards make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss out our upcoming video on the data hand
what is it exactly guess what regardless of which
ports we used the results were the same or within margin of error whether we
added an extra keyboard input while firing off 100 clicks or not right ports
active use about 49 milliseconds wrong ports
49 milliseconds right ports 49 milliseconds
one right one wrong 49 milliseconds every single time but
let's try it you know just to make sure that in a real world scenario with a lot
more random input your usb ports aren't going to cause you to miss that crucial
headshot all right let's uh let's pull this back a little bit
i'm just going to play cs go first man for a little while i was playing with a
friend and the friend was in finland so i was playing with a bunch of russians
and it's like 300 millisecond lag wow you got all the all the money all right
let's go with the og latency feels pretty good like everything i'm doing is pretty much
instantaneous all right well i'm not noticing any hitching or anything when i'm moving
around especially not like pressing buttons on the keyboard i would expect
there to be a difference if i if like if there's a difference i would be able to
see it with this monitor since it's like 360 hertz i'm not mistaken yeah so the
overall experience i'm having right now is pretty much the same as the
experience i had when plugged into the usb 3.0 port yeah oh right sorry the
lightning gaming ports yeah this is the plebian usb 2.0 ports that you'd
normally probably want to plug your keyboard and mouse into because they don't need that much data man this game
mode is kind of weird because everybody's everywhere practice thoughts oh yeah it is deathmatch um
casual dust should be a little more tactical and less frenetic in this case
which i mean i don't know if that's better or worse for
like twitch reflexes but i can't hear anything so it would help to know where
everybody's coming from generally
that was not a headshot but it was what i was aiming at
also not a head shot so i'm not clicking heads i don't think this sensitivity is
quite what i'm used to either but it's closer to it actually one thing that's
kind of weird about having a really high refresh rate is every little twitch that
you make whether you mean to or not is registered
so like as i'm trying to aim like i'm like constantly trying to readjust
yeah let's try doom there's a second yeah there it is
yeah i'm on the 2.0 ports that's why i'm dying right now
here we go i got some health all right let's let's switch it over to the
lightning gaming boards cause like so far like i haven't been dropping inputs
i haven't noticed any hitching my aiming's been okay even what's that
mouse cursor doing there yeah i'm not noticing a big difference
here chief are you surprised anyway no i mean we might see a big difference if we
were like saturating the bandwidth or the like the controller but that's not
what they actually advertise like they advertise a stupid little
oh no you're pressing keyboard buttons and now your your game is
your mouse is no longer accurate anymore it's it's skipping around every time you
press the w key your mouse needs to wait it's not quite how that works
like even if it does have to wait even if they like maybe they have like an
oscilloscope thing where they've actually
verified that it makes a difference if it doesn't make a difference in frames
in your game does it actually make a difference and as of right now
it does not appear to be making a difference i don't know maybe you could convince
yourself out of placebo that you're getting a better gaming experience but
yeah i'm not calling bs this graph though
that's bs unlike our sponsor crucial thanks to
crucial for sponsoring today's video crucial is making high quality external
ssds more accessible with their x6 and x8 portable ssds the x6 is crucial's
ultra portable SSD that holds up to 4 terabytes and has speeds of 800
megabytes per second want something even faster the x8 holds up to 2 terabytes
and has speeds up to 1050 megabytes per second they work great with pcs macs
consoles Android and more both are durable and tested against drops and
extreme temperatures so you can take them with you wherever you go without worry with over 20 years of experience
in the industry they make tech that you can trust get your crucial x6 and x8
portable ssds using the link in the video description below well
there you have it another example of why you shouldn't just buy products with
random gaming labels on them if you have a better application for
multiple usb controllers on a single board i can think of a few let us know
in the comments and if you like this video make sure to check out our how motherboards work turbo nerd edition for
a little bit more information on well how all this works