USB 2.0 PCIe recommendations

[Chief Blur Buster]

Many Thanks

Unfortunately, mousetester is only a tiny keyhole to system behavior.

Lag can appear only when things occur concurrently (network traffic + 100% CPU + 100% GPU + keyboard + USB + etc), like really playing a game.

If you get lag problems You may /also/ want to test 2000Hz or 4000Hz. This reduces mouse CPU utilization dramatically, which can reduce lag.

The PCIe card is only a $25 purchase. It may or may not help, but it's a low-risk to see if mousetester looks better (And CPU% is lower) with a PCIe card.

[Thatweirdinputlag]

Kind of a late reply, but I bought both:

the Belkin
https://www.amazon.com/Belkin-Hi-Speed- ... 700&sr=8-3

and

the Startech
https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Por ... 700&sr=8-4

These are the only two USB 2.0 PCIE cards I could find on amazon. I bought them because I have one USB 3.1 hub on my motherboard and I have an audio interface and a 1000hz wooting one keyboard connected to my motherboard's USB and I wanted a separate chip for my mouse. I've heard some people say not to use PCIE USB cards because they add latency but I haven't noticed any. I don't have a latency monitoring tool and I don't think this is really relevant but I achieve around the same scores on human benchmark and I've actually gotten my lowest scores with the PCIE card with some other tweaks I may also have just been really awesome for two days straight.

I tried doing research between the two cards and they do use different chips. The Belkin uses a NEC D720101GJ chip and the startech uses some VIA chip. All I was able to find regarding that is some post on a forum from 2009 saying the Renesas (NEC) D720101 is a really good chip and VIA chips come close to it. Either way I don't think it matters and I'm not even sure if the D720101GJ is the same as the D720101 chip or what the VIA chip's model number even is.

I first tried the Belkin and to me I immediately felt a difference compared to my motherboard usb, it kind of felt like disabling fullscreen optimizations at first. The best way to describe it was that my aim felt more consistent. If this effect was real and not placebo I would chalk it up to my mouse not being drowned out by my keyboard's polling rate.

My mousegraphs were more consistent on the USB cards than on my motherboard. I will say though that when I first got the cards and used the mouse tester graphs I got insanely clean graphs but when I checked my motherboard's usb 2.0 port graph it was the same. I think the main takeaway is that outside of keyboard interference the biggest effect on mousegraphs will be the driver/OS interaction. I have consistently noticed that I can eliminate spiky mousegraphs right after startup by killing dwm.exe and having it restart. Why?

Either way to me both of them felt pretty much the same. My personal favorite is the Belkin, because its blue, but I think either works. That post from 2009 is dated and there was no proof of what the guy was saying. I don't think there is really going to be a difference in latency or anything between them and the main benefit of them is to just get your mouse on a separate USB chip. If anyone actually knows any specifics about the USB chips themselves feel free to correct me. Fyi I have it installed in the last PCIE slot on a z490 aourus xtreme motherboard and it shares bandwidth with an NVME drive. I hope this wasn't too verbose, I just wanted to share my entire experience with both cards.

It might be interesting for me to test motherboard vs PCIE card with just my mouse connected on either one because last time I left my keyboard connected to my motherboard, big mistake I know, but I think I'll save that for a day when I'm really bored. Either way I don't notice any negative impact from having my mouse on one of them and if you really don't like one after buying it amazon's return policy is pretty great.

TLDR; There are only 2 USB 2.0 PCIE cards on Amazon. Buy both and try them yourself then return the one you don't like.

I have the Renesas since that's what it's identified as in my device manager, I use it to plug my keyboard dongle so it's separate from the hub that is used for the mouse. I can also tell you that it literally helped for a couple of hours then the lag came crawling back.