Speed - USB 2.0 vs. PS/2

[Sammy5000]

Hey...

Dumb question - is there a speed difference (marginal or not) to hooking up a mouse via PS/2 connect or USB connect?

 

[Link19]

I believe so, but you won't notice any difference just working within Windows moving your mouse around and clicking on menus and icons. I believe you will only notice a difference in gaming when using the mouse (not through menus in the game, but actually in the real live part of playing the game). You can plug mice and keyboards into USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 ports and you won't notice a difference in gaming as mice and keyboards do not take advantage of the higher speed of USB 2.0 ports, unlike external hard drives and CD burners do.

 

[0roo0roo]

yes there is. default ps2 is like 40~hz in windows. bad. default usb is 125hz refresh.

with certain drivers you can push ps2 mice to 100-200hz. no real difference between them at that point. difference between mouse hardware/sensor is more important after that. get a logitech mx series mouse for best results.

 

[jrichrds]

I noticed with my Logitech and Microsoft optical mice that the drivers set the PS/2 default to 100khz. And it's adjustable up to 200khz. Apparently, going too high has side-effects, but that may just be with older systems. I use the USB connection now, which I believe is non-adjustable at 125khz.

 

[Peter]

No matter how often that myth is repeated - the adjustable rate on PS/2 is NOT an advantage, but merely a kludge to let the user balance between smooth mouse movement with high system load and jerky pointer motion at low system load. Note that fast CPUs don't help, since the access times toward this historically ancient piece of silicon that is the keyboard/mouse controller (we're talking 1977, 8-bit ISA here!) are astronomical.

On USB, which is a bus mastering PCI device, smooth pointer movement and low system load aren't contradictory goals, so there simply is no NEED to make anything adjustable.

USB. Twenty years of progress over PS/2.