[Power/EMI] I discover why sometime PC become fast and low input lag and otherwise feel high input lag

[Nawafwabs]

Hello guys

Its long time with low latency and great gameplay

So this week I remove greenwave filter from power strip
That share with PC


And emi goes to 280mv i turn off pc and it back to 19mv all house but if i turn on PC it goes to 280mV

So i think it was power cord and i change it but nothing help

I take psu from PC case and i did jump test while plug in power strip with emi meter also and it show 80mv


I put it back in pc and it show 280v , I turn off pc fan but it didnt help , i test 2 psu from evga same emi results

I order new one from corsair and i will test it when it arrives to see if my psu has problem or not

Now i keep one filter on power strip until new psu arrives

[nuggify]

I've no doubt EMI could play a part with system issues and really bad mains input, here's my 2 cents worth or pennies worth if you're in the UK like me

1. Switch mode PC power supplies have a transformer that 'should' decouple the mains input from the DC output, I would have thought your mains would have to be really bad before you'd see any problems on the DC output. Running purely off the battery from a UPS should rule this out. Also oscilloscopes are reasonably cheap these days, if this was driving me insane I'd invest in one and check your DC voltage for noise, you could permanently hook it up and watch it, see if any noise appears when you get lag happening. If you have bad mains though it could easily be affecting other pats of your system such as your monitor, that might cause frames to be dropped / random behaviors ?

2. Wouldn't just good shielding take care of most / all EMI problems ? such as a fully enclosed PC case instead of one with a perspex / glass window, all cables shielded including all Ethernet cables. I've worked with products where EMI conformance was needed in terms of leaking out frequencies, and making products immune to external EMI, even the smallest gap in the outer case can cause issues for conformance. So in other words if you have some strong external EMI (e.g mobile phone base station at the bottom of your garden) and you want to shield from it you need to make your PC case literally water tight. Having said that there are parts of your system that typically aren't shielded such as your mouse, when you hold your mouse you could be acting as an antenna for EMI and causing interference for the sensitive circuitry a few cm away from the palm of your hand. I'd try some conductive paint on the inside of the mouse shell and ground that, tricky though, might be easier to identify what external EMI you have first, EMF meters are reasonably cheap these days. Also sitting your Wifi router, mobile phone, cordless landline phone etc next to your PC or locating your PC next to a wall with mains cables routed in or the other side of the wall would be obviously something you'd not do whether you're suffering from EMI or not.

3. In terms of input lag, looking at the mains and EMI seems like the last resort, have you done a detailed look at your PC setup first, in terms of lag I'd always start of by looking at / using 'LatencyMon', not so long ago I pulled out a cheap USB2 card from my PC because the ISR count was just insane from it, that definitely helped. Any bad configurations or drivers causing random lag / problems should be picked up LatencyMon. Watch some of FR33THY vids, he's very good at explaining https://www.youtube.com/user/chrisfreeth/videos
Is it online only games with the problem ? have you done a detailed look at your internet, there's plenty of horror stories where the ISP has in effect screwed up / failed to recognize / fix an issue. Here's one I've been involved with and this is BT one of the biggest ISPs in the UK
https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-setup- ... -p/1930963
Also it could easily be your internal network, I'd use Wireshark and check what's happening, any malware or background task could be firing up randomly and consuming bandwidth, TCPView is another good utility for viewing whats happening on your network.

4. Watch out for temperature issues, this can easily cause slow downs and unexpected behaviors, in the past I had an AMD system where the motherboard regulators were over heating causing the CPU frequency to be throttled down, end result was a laggy / stuttering game, took me quite some time to figure out what was happening. PC cases generally have bad / poorly thought through air flow, when you think about your typical PC it can easily be consuming 500W to 1KW of power, that's going to create a lot of heat, if your overall case cooling isn't decent then any part of your PC could be over heating and causing random issues.

5. I've never had this issue because I've always spec'd my power supplies way above what a PC needs but could your PSU be under rated based on your CPU and graphics card needs ? you're only going to likely have problems when you put your system under load seeing as your typical PC will throttle everything down when doing mundane tasks, might be worth checking ?
Personally I'd say a minimum these days is 750W to be reasonably safe, probably if I was building a new gaming PC I might even go for a 1KW PSU. Go back some number of years and for example 350W was considered ok.

Appreciate the time you took to post this. However this behaivor happens across all PCs in my home- 4 desktops, a laptop (even Nintendo Switches and Cable TV boxes). So I believe that adequately rules out points 3, 4 , and 5. It also happens with the internet disconnected so it cannot be ISP. I know the source of the EMF in my home, however it is anything but an easy fix (shared waterlines in this neighborhood offering a parallel return path for current). My electrician confirmed this was the source of elevated (very large) fields. What you say about shielding is definitely in line with my experiences. If I shield a cable it works decently for a short time but eventually completely degrades back to the same point.

[skylit]

Hello guys

Its long time with low latency and great gameplay

So this week I remove greenwave filter from power strip
That share with PC


And emi goes to 280mv i turn off pc and it back to 19mv all house but if i turn on PC it goes to 280mV

So i think it was power cord and i change it but nothing help

I take psu from PC case and i did jump test while plug in power strip with emi meter also and it show 80mv


I put it back in pc and it show 280v , I turn off pc fan but it didnt help , i test 2 psu from evga same emi results

I order new one from corsair and i will test it when it arrives to see if my psu has problem or not

Now i keep one filter on power strip until new psu arrives

Does the filter actually help your situation? Seems like snake oil to me, but its cheap enough to try I guess..

[nuggify]

And emi goes to 280mv i turn off pc and it back to 19mv all house but if i turn on PC it goes to 280mV

So i think it was power cord and i change it but nothing help

I take psu from PC case and i did jump test while plug in power strip with emi meter also and it show 80mv


I put it back in pc and it show 280v , I turn off pc fan but it didnt help , i test 2 psu from evga same emi results

I order new one from corsair and i will test it when it arrives to see if my psu has problem or not

Now i keep one filter on power strip until new psu arrives

Spoiler alert: its not your PSU. I toyed with this idea and have now tried 4 PSUs. Anyway a faulty PSU is most likely going to give us hard faults (PC not booting etc) instead of input lag issues.

Speaking to the filter it would seem that the PC itself is putting some noise on your system so maybe your grounding is compromised if the noise is not dissipating properly.

[MT_]

Just curious here, but if EMI would cause latency and stutter it would mean something horrible is happening to an extend that it can delay things in an OS for possibly milliseconds, thats a huge time for any OS where we are usually dealing in <nanoseconds.

Short of giving errors and BSOD's, are we observing error correction / retransmission / skipping data here? (Think USB, PCI-E, etc)
I can't imagine it this being anything but errors or retransmission/correction. Can't just be 'its adding lag' but nothing else is going on.

[Nawafwabs]

And emi goes to 280mv i turn off pc and it back to 19mv all house but if i turn on PC it goes to 280mV

So i think it was power cord and i change it but nothing help

I take psu from PC case and i did jump test while plug in power strip with emi meter also and it show 80mv


I put it back in pc and it show 280v , I turn off pc fan but it didnt help , i test 2 psu from evga same emi results

I order new one from corsair and i will test it when it arrives to see if my psu has problem or not

Now i keep one filter on power strip until new psu arrives

Spoiler alert: its not your PSU. I toyed with this idea and have now tried 4 PSUs. Anyway a faulty PSU is most likely going to give us hard faults (PC not booting etc) instead of input lag issues.

Speaking to the filter it would seem that the PC itself is putting some noise on your system so maybe your grounding is compromised if the noise is not dissipating properly.

You tried 4 psu with emi meter or you tried it by feeling ?

The psu will come and i will test it to know where is the problem

The emi goes high in booting before logo motherboard show up

Now i dont have problem while filter in power strip

[nuggify]

You tried 4 psu with emi meter or you tried it by feeling ?

The psu will come and i will test it to know where is the problem

The emi goes high in booting before logo motherboard show up

Now i dont have problem while filter in power strip

The problem is not from the PSU or any PC hardware for that matter. I am pretty sure the Greenwave Filter does nothing for this issue. In fact I am skeptical of the Greenwave devices in general. Seems like snakeoil for people worried the EMF is physically harmful. The issue has to do with our grounding and grounding conductors having objectionable current on them. That is why it can seem that your PC is creating the noise- when in fact any SMPS or devices in general will create "electrical noise" and distort the power sinewave. The issue lies within the fact that the noise (interference) has no better path.

[Nawafwabs]

You tried 4 psu with emi meter or you tried it by feeling ?

The psu will come and i will test it to know where is the problem

The emi goes high in booting before logo motherboard show up

Now i dont have problem while filter in power strip

The problem is not from the PSU or any PC hardware for that matter. I am pretty sure the Greenwave Filter does nothing for this issue. In fact I am skeptical of the Greenwave devices in general. Seems like snakeoil for people worried the EMF is physically harmful. The issue has to do with our grounding and grounding conductors having objectionable current on them. That is why it can seem that your PC is creating the noise- when in fact any SMPS or devices in general will create "electrical noise". The issue lies within the fact that the noise (interference) has no where to go.

Please if you dont have tools to test dont replay on my post

I have emf meter and emi meter and emf show no effect on hardware

[nuggify]

Please if you dont have tools to test dont replay on my post

I have emf meter and emi meter and emf show no effect on hardware

Ah so I guess you are the only one who can reply here because no one else is buying Greenwave filters huh? Get off your high horse, you barely grasp any of this and have posted on my threads plenty of times. The difference was that I was not a pretentious jerk about it though. Good luck with your problems buddy.

[mello]

Have you guys looked into EMI power line filters that are available from Schaffner Company ? You install them directly into your power line and some of these might actually solve your problems, especially the EMI filters that are directed at industrial level applications (highest and widest attenuation ranges). Here is the link. Datasheet with full specification is also available for each filter. Might be worth a try.