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Dead/malfunctioning USB ports

frostedflakes

frostedflakes

Diamond Member
Just kind of curious how common this is. I've never had problems with this before, but back when I was more into OCing and tweaking I upgraded my hardware more often and rarely kept anything for more than probably six months or so.

I've had my latest system for about two and a half years, though, and for the last one and a half years probably the USB ports have been acting up. It started with the internal headers, they still work but only operate at USB 1.1 speed instead of 2.0. At first only one of the ports were affected by this but now all four internal ports have the same flaw. And just recently one of my rear USB ports stopped working altogether (before that it was working fine at full 2.0 speed). 😛

Anyways was just kind of curious what other peoples experiences were with this, is it pretty common for these to start going out after a few years or is this just bad luck? Would buying a higher end motherboard help (I'm just running a budget ASRock board)? Computer room can get pretty hot during summer as well, maybe that contributed to this problem.
 
Your experience is same as mine. Makes you very very skeptical on today's $300+ boards with all the bells and whistles.
 
I have seen USB ports fail just a handful of times. Not any correlation that I've noticed between cheapo boards and high-end boards. About 50% of the time I get "I plugged in my ipod/hard drive/camera and it sparked/popped/zzz'd and now it doesn't work anymore". I'm assuming in those cases static(?) shorted out something in the port. The other cases I have no idea...
 
My Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R rev1.1 had USB issues and HDD Led problem..RMA second one came with the same problems. Luck of the draw I guess.
 
I had an internal header plugged into a front USB panel that shorted (it literally zapped and make a spark), now the board automatically switches itself off if I do so much as plug a connector onto that particular header. No fault of the board tho, in fact I think it's done well to save the usb controller.

I guess there's probably only a few suppliers of the components.
 
I found out a while back that with usb ports the best thing you can do is buy a hub, for a couple reasons. It keeps the ports on the motherboard from being worn out from plugging/unplugging stuff. If some usb device fails, it takes out the hub, not the port on the pc. If you can get a powered hub, even better since some hubs have a much higher capacity than some usb ports on the motherboard. The way I have mine set up now is that I bought a good hub that has support for powering devices, then I replaced the power adapter with a direct connection to my pc PSU +5V line.
Used it that way for years now without a single problem.
 
Originally posted by: Modelworks
If you can get a powered hub, even better since some hubs have a much higher capacity than some usb ports on the motherboard.
Click to expand...

Yep. I've been using a cheap powered hub from Wally World for years without issues. More convenient too since its on the desktop.

 
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