Just for the sake of discussion I figured I would post my friend Ashr's comment he made on another forum relating to this issue. He does not post very much these days about this issue as he is the one and only person that seems to have permanently fixed it (full mitigation of symptoms, we still have no clue what the source is) with chemical grounding. For all those that are curious what his exact symptoms were here is the thread (I was the OP) he posted this comment on:
https://www.overclock.net/threads/the-m ... 96/page-21
It is post #417 near the bottom of the linked page. He has some embedded videos and images that are useful.
Here is the text:
Ashr:
"Just chiming in to say that I've experienced all these issues at length as well. I've also come across other bizarre **** like moving chairs in another room affecting my mouse, and sparks in my displayport when plugging in the cable -
. But first, I should say that I live in India where infrastructure ranges from great to very poor. Many contractors don't bother with stuff like regulations and code, and we have blackouts nearly every other day. There's a massive electrical transformer outside my apartment building which catches fire every other month, and when it does, the electricity department come over and fix it, but only temporarily. The electrical contractor who worked on my apartment building literally ran away with the circuit diagrams after a disagreement with the architect lol so we don't even know how the wires are set up.
Our ISPs are also similar - Network cables are all over the place, with 4 different ISPs hanging their cables in a big cluster on a nearby streetlight -
https://i.imgur.com/U16xAvH.png
Coming to my house, I've had water heaters and a UPS fail, a computer PSU going kaput, and the outdoor unit of air conditioner literally catching fire and melting. Sometimes my power strip also lights up even when the switch is turned off -
https://i.imgur.com/AntwbOf.png
I've experienced mild shocks from my PC case in the past so I had multiple electricians come over and check the outlets. Most of them just told me everything was fine but over here, they're not exactly the highly trained sort. I've never even seen them carry stuff like a multimeter with them. It eventually stopped happening when I had a separate grounding rod installed that is connected to the single outlet I use for my PC, but this one time, I pulled out all the cables out from my case including the power cable. The only thing that was still connected was Ethernet which ran to my router which was still on. I received a shock again when I touched the case. It never happened again though.
More bizarre **** -
Fan hub touching my PSU shroud producing a loud noise -
(I've tried removing the hub and fans completely too. It doesn't help).
And the strangest thing I've ever seen... We've had terrible wifi performance in this house for as long as we've been here. Speeds were always garbage on both 2.4 and 5ghz with Netflix buffering all the time or sites flat out not loading. On a whim, I had an electrician pull out all the old unused phone line cables behind the walls. Guess what? Wifi has been perfect ever since with a stable 40ish mbit on 2.4ghz and 90+ on 5ghz. You can see the speedtest history here for before and after -
https://i.imgur.com/1zRRtdQ.png
4k Netflix now streams without any issues and everyone else in the house is very happy.
Anyway, my mouse used to be completely uncontrollable previously, either laggy or extra fast, often rapidly switching within minutes. Stuff like placing my phone on top of my PC case or touching any power cables going to my PC or monitor would affect the way it felt. I was also severely desynced from any games I was playing, with bullets simply passing through people as if they weren't there. I switched my PC out entirely, buying relatively high end hardware, must have tried like 5 different motherboards, 3 GPUs, 3 PSUs and what not, along with multiple versions of Windows. Nothing helped. I picked up a Furman Power Conditioner which made things much better for about 3 weeks, until it just randomly went back to **** for whatever reason. I finally bought an online UPS and it made things far better for me. I could finally play to a certain extent, but it still didn't feel perfect. I too noticed similar things like what Gunit posted a few pages back, where forcing a different frequency output felt better. I'm in a 50hz country, and forcing 60hz output gives me the best result from the UPS, no idea why. When the lag is present, it's not just the mouse, but rather a system wide lag where programs open slowly, webpages load in parts, games both online and offline feel desynced and so on.
However, a few months ago, we had another blackout here and the power guys messed around with some stuff outside. For about 2 months after that, everything was basically perfect for me. No lag whatsoever. But around 2 weeks back after another blackout, and subsequent power department response, my PC doesn't feel perfect again. Unfortunately, I have no way of getting them to fix anything for me because over here, they won't bother with anything more than bringing electricity into the house. Basically, if your lights come on, you're all set. Finally, when I had the grounding rod installed, the electrician told me to keep the spot damp. Not sure why. When I was lagging 2 days back and out of ideas, I went downstairs to check it and the soil looked really hard and dry. I ended up pouring 2 liters of water directly on the spot, and the lag went away for about 3 hours lol. I have no idea why any of this affects anything, nor will I pretend to know stuff about how electricity works, but it does in my case.
Now I have to say that it is very normal to be skeptical about all this, because these things are unheard of. I've had multiple people tell me that it's all in my head. However, I've been actively involved in esports for nearly 2 decades now. I've placed in multiple places across many cities, and even some top level tournaments around the world. I've lived in countries like Canada and took a team to a bootcamp in the US just a few months ago. In the past 2-3 years, I must have played on at least 30 different PCs, and the only ones to have any kind of issues were the ones in my house. I don't have it anywhere else. I also owned a Nintendo Switch which would lag in my house, both docked and handheld, but would be just fine when I took it somewhere else. The hardware I'm currently using was bought from a friend in a different city, and when he had it, he could easily achieve some tight timings with the RAM sticks (Samsung B-die) but in my house, the same settings fail after a few minutes. I have to loosen the timings to be stable. My older Skylake rig which exhibited these issues in my house was sold to another competitive gamer in another city, and he hasn't complained about anything so far."
This post was well before he tried chemical grounding. Now it has completely mitigated the issues for his devices since June (when he installed the chem ground).
Hope this is helpful for anyone out there.