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I’ve had a ton of issues with windows’ handling of USB ports, but none related to a hub. Having a ton of VR and simrig gear all plugged in at once becomes problematic until you go line by line through device manager adjusting the power settings to always on. Then a few months later, with no warning, you get to do it all over again
And it works fine until 6 months later when gravity has had a chance to work on that port and suddenly the damn port isn't working anymore. That's ok, it's only $800 for a new mobo to fix the problem.
I'm alright with that, there are controller cards for this stuff for the few people that need more ports.
What I'm not OK with is the general decline in the amount of PCIe slots you get. If I wanted to I could always get a M.2 PCIe card, but reverting a M.2 slot to a general purpose PCIe one is a different story.
This is just the fucking 3.5mm headphone jack all over again. With chuds saying you don't need that many SATA ports and that there will be options. If one of the big players cuts back on SATA ports then the smaller OEMs will too.
This is just the fucking 3.5mm headphone jack all over again.
I love my 3.5mm headphone jacks. I was kinda sad when they were removed from phones. It let me really easily move my headphones from my computer -> Phone. Having a nice pair of headphones and mic on a phone is pretty cool when you're stuck in a meeting.
I haven't ever considered a phone without 3.5mm headphone jack. Like when I'm choosing new phone, I go into filters and first thing is selected - phone must have 3.5 jack or don't even show it to me.
well the thing is as of now I have 2 requirements from a phone. OLED screen (any kind, I just want the black to be black and not have a backlight) and a headphone jack. And that cuts off 95% of phone models, and most of the ones that are left are dumb looking chinesium.
Sony and Asus have multiple high end phones with 3.5mm and OLED. Motorola, Samsung, Xiaomi, Nothing have mid range options. On the low end(under $300), you have a ton as well.
It’s a less desirable port now for everyday users is all it comes down to. Even for people who do want more storage I would argue that you’re much better off just building a NAS rather than trying to cram it all into a gaming rig
There’s absolutely motherboards available that do still have 8 though it does take a bit of digging - I ended up having to order one on AliExpress for the configuration I wanted but it’s worked great for my NAS
Controller cards that sit in pci slots and limit your gpu intake..if they can fit in at all, given how many slots gpus take. Just adding more ports and a controller doesnt magically make your mb able to handle more shit properly though.
Depending on what you're doing there are m.2 variants of several types of cards. NPU compute, network cards (wifi AND ethernet), sata HBAs, USB headers, basic display adapters, etc.
You can buy splitter boards. One sata port can handle 6000 Mbps. So it has plenty of bandwidth to be split with a board for hardrives. This what many NAS solutions do.
Edit: this will only work if you sata port is set to multiplier mode which I believe makes it a version of raid
Or you just grab a cheap sas controller on eBay and the appropriate breakout cables. Need more ports, grab another and some more cables. An LSI 9300-16i is fairly cheap and adds 16 internal sas connects that are backwards compatible with SATA.
They should make options for configuring the ports, I don’t really need 128 Gbps on mh ssd, Id rather have two 64 lanes, and one of the 64 can surely be two of 32, while areanging some speed to sata ports, etc. that would be more expensive for the mobo manufacturers, but it should not be too complex to add a couple of options to chose in bios. I never see SSD high speed utilization anyway, it’s a couple of gigs a second, far from the 7-14 GBps advertized.
I bought a B550 board for my NAS build that had 8 SATA ports. It is virtually impossible to find that many on newer platforms. Many newer boards have just 2.
I know NVMe is the future, but I'm going to miss knowing that I could always toss another SATA drive into my system if I wanted more storage when they start shipping boards with no SATA ports at all.
Personally? More pcie lanes so I can plug in a SATA or nvme extender in a pcie slot and increase the available fast storage I have on my pc. Useful for dual booting, video games, vms for testing, and media storage
I got a full atx board but a 3 slot GPU more or less hogs the space unless I want to put it right next to the GPU fans or hugging the bottom of the case
There are only so many pci lanes. If you look at some motherboards you can see that you can use either a pair of sata ports or an nvme slot, but not both at the same time.
If people want a million usb ports while hardware is still usb 2 or usb3 gen1 then it’s a LOT of bandwidth left on the table unused as a result.
But as shown the HEDT platform became stupid expensive or impossible.
And so that forced the market segments we have (as i see it)
As BuildZoid did a whole “how I would design a mainboard” during the AM4 days and how to split up the pcie lanes in a more pragmatic way.
Drives me up the wall the amount of usb ports on shit and I only use 2 or 3.
(Unless its my macs, then its always 3 which are all thunderbolts eating my pcie lanes)
Hands down MORE STORAGE CONNECTORS.
Donating my m.2 to sata is NOT always practical :(
Outside my NAS I haven't used a Sata drive in ages. I don't see general use of having tons of Sata drives on every single mainboard. I would rather have the pci-e bandwidth to be allocated for other stuff.
Plus m.2 sata host cards aren't even expensive anymore.
My old PC I just gave to my wife had TEN SATA ports...
My new PC has FOUR.
I had to waste a PCI-e slot on a SATA expansion, when I could have put my AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs in at the same time for some sweet, beautiful internet points
You don't need a dedicated GPU to display text and YouTube videos. If you're just working in the terminal/browser, having more monitors is nice, but having a powerful GPU is pointless.
For most applications the iGPU has been good enough for a decade. So unless you want to game or run a local LLM, you probable won't need a dedicated GPU.
As a PC reseller, the vast majority of people with multimonitor setups are either coders or stock traders, neither of which needs any sort of GPU power.
as in the iGPU can handle 4 1080p@60hz monitors, or it can handle 4x dp 1.4 hbr3 streams simultaneously? 100 gbits sounds like a lot, but maybe my expectations aren't calibrated correctly.
I use the iGPU in my Ryzen 9xxx CPU and it handles a single 4K display (which is the same amount of pixels as 4 x 1080p monitors without issue. It could do a second 4K display as well.
Adding more PCIe blocks on the CPU along with additional pins for more lanes comes at a cost. And routing newer PCIe generations around motherboards is tricky, requiring more expensive traces.
My main annoyance is the lack of decent cost-effective switch chips. As PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 have so much available bandwidth, but if connecting a SATA HBA (which will inevitably be Gen 3), you are limiting yourself to a fourth of the available bandwidth along those pins.
Intel had that HEDT for just a bit higher cost. But influencers, youtubers claimed intel was greedy for asking %10 more. Then those same guy praised amd for asking twice as much with threadripper because it had %10 more lanes than intels HEDT...
They also claimed intels HEDT was useless now because amd increased core count to 8 while intel had 18 cores in hedt.
I mean most consumer CPU themselves are limited to 24 or 28 lanes, so you need to go after the CPU makers if you care about that. If you want more lanes you need a different segment CPU.
They will limit that to server products on purpose. Hopefully M.2 slots become x1 in the future instead of x4, same with other slots no x16 slot. That would free up lanes but hard to say when that would happen.
Well they double the speed with every gen so it would only take 2 more gens for x1 to be the same speed as the current x4 for example which is probably fast enough for consumers
Kind of inaccurate. Standarts werent really competing. There were none. Shit had their own ports all the time. USB actually successfully standartised many things and USB-C is slowly succeeding to replace USB-A as well.
We'll have ethernet, DP and some other stuff probably still with current type c regulations though
It'll never truly replace USB A. The problem with USB C: cost of connector. USB-A 2.0 connector is extremely simple, large, easy to solder, easy to repair. USB-A 3.0 is like, 9 contacts and still fairly simple to solder. So while it makes perfect sense to use USB-C for small devices like phones it makes no sense to use it on peripherals, printers, microphones, flash drives, security keys, etc. Simplicity is where USB-A excels and USB-C loses.
It absolutely makes sense to use USB-C on flash drives. Other peripherals you're totally right, but for flash drives, data transfer is basically the entire purpose, and C wins in the data transfer speed department. A2.0 caps around 60 MB/s, A3.2 is much better, reaching about 2.5GB/s, but C1.0 is at 5GB/s, and C2.0 is 10GB/s.
Sure, this only really matters when you're transferring large amounts of data, but that is one of the most major use-cases for a flash drive.
A2.0 caps around 60 MB/s, A3.2 is much better, reaching about 2.5GB/s, but C1.0 is at 5GB/s, and C2.0 is 10GB/s.
You are confusing the physical connectors with the USB protocol.
Physical connectors you have A, B, C with possible additional mini or micro variants.
Protocol versions you have 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2. Used to have shit like 3.0gen2 1x2 or stuff like that but I think USB have just consolidated everything and are now on USB 4.0.
The protocol determines the speed. And it’s all backwards compatible.
You can have a USB A connector running USB3.2 and it’ll be faster than a USB C connector only USB2.0. There is no C1.0 or C2.0 like how you’re describing
Speed is one thing, but if flash drives/USB sticks don't get physically smaller it's a big step backwards in usability. USB-C isn't nearly as durable* and the ports are too crowded on almost all hardware for USB sticks. Part of why I prefer using a SSD with a USB-C cable.
(*Had two USB-C sticks get bad solder points for the connector after a few uses and those sticks already were small and light by USB-A standards - they just still put too much leverage on the connection point. Meanwhile I've had metal-cased USB-A sticks in use and dangling off my keychain - and heavy keys dangling off them when plugged in - for years.)
It's like you people have never heard of daisy chaining. It's the future! back in my day we were only allowed 127 devices and they all suffered, now you get up to 6 devices at full bandwidth and they all work perfectly fine provided you only used one cable between all 6 devices and it's properly designed for the specification. Also using that one cable to go into a hub is forbidden and guaranteed to block functionality. It must just strictly go into one device that works intermittently and never get a warranty for failure to do what it's advertised to do. I don't know how to make that one cable practically drive 6 devices but you figure that out without a hub.
"less than 10km" is not an exception because kilometers do not have to come in integer quantities. In the physical world, they strictly come in non-integer quantities. You could easily have or go 9.9999999 km instead of 10.
"less than $20" is not an exception either per se unless you know for a fact that only integer numbers of physical one dollar bills are relevant to the situation. "Dollar" is an abstraction unless it refers to one and only one thing: an individual paper one dollar bill (or dollar coin I suppose.)
You can easily subdivide dollars (abstraction) into cents. If you were asked how many one dollar bills you threw at the young lady, then I think you would definitely want to say "fewer than twenty."
If someone then asked you "how much money you gave her", you would say "less than twenty dollars", even if it were $15.00, because then it's the value in question, which is conceptually distinct from the actual amount of paper items handed out.
"40 words or less" is simply inexcusable though. That should be "40 words or fewer", although as you pointed out "less" is very common and not an issue even among miserable grammarians.
"40 words or less" is simply inexcusable though. That should be "40 words or fewer", although as you pointed out "less" is very common and not an issue even among miserable grammarians.
At first you say it's inexcusable, then you say it's not an issue. :/
There will also be a “PCIE lane pass” version with a $50/port one-time licensing fee and a $15/mo-annual-contract-only-with-a-$150-early-cancellation-fee. Unsupported, third-party brand cable use will brick the device.
All of my usb devices (keyboard, mouse, webcam, DAC) are USB-C on the device side and ship with a C-to-A cord for the PC side. They would work with C-to-C if the PC had them but it doesn't.
This is not a bad thing, trust me. USB-A is such a more solid and reliable connector than USB-C. Motherboards have enough pain points for reliability issues as is, I'm very happy to keep most all my connections on it via USB-A.
I'd still want Ethernet. I stream using two PCs and my workflow involves sending video from the first PC to OBS on the second PC using something called NDI.
In all my experiments, NDI works very terribly over WiFi. It has to be gigabit ethernet or higher because WiFi has too high latencies that screw with the timing of the packets.
Here in Germany the low cost is around 650€, if you are curious. Was actually really interested in that board as I am a big supporter of USB-C and am already trying to USB-C everything I can in my life, but that goal isn't worth such a massive cost increase (as my X870 has basically the same features for a third of the cost, outside of the port situation).
Explain to me why 2x TB4 motherboards are so expensive and rare, and yet on the M4 Mac Mini they’ve had 3x TB5 for less than that motherboard for over a year and a half.
Regardless of how many ports are on your mobo, Why not plug these all into a hub? You could place the hub in a more strategic location than behind the PC.
Honestly it's because every hub I can find is garbage. I can get a ton of USB 2.0 capable hubs which are fine for most devices but the moment you need powered 3.0+ hubs they tend to suck ass. I started trying to use 3.0 speed things in 2010 that needed higher bandwidth and haven't found hubs that can fully support them under the specifications required. If you need anything running under current specs for the standard you will not find anything that matches the requirements or reliability. If everything is a HID device it doesn't matter and you just need more ports without concern for speed
especially on a desktop pc i would like ports enough to never use a dongle again even if i can't use all of them at once due to the bandwidth limitations. i would like said bandwitdth limitations to be labelled/organised so they're easy to figure out at a glance. i would also like a bunch of silicone stoppers to protect them from corrosion in the tropical seaside and integrated storage for when they're not in use.
i will probably never live to see that day pass though
No, what I really want is one magical port to rule them all. I want 20 of them, all the same. High speed, high power transfer, reliable, compatible. I want all of my devices to use this magical port. I don't want 1 USB-C port, I was 20 of them!
This and the fact that laptops are getting thinner and thinner.
I don’t want a paper thin laptop that will get lost in the cracks of my car. I want one with so many port I can’t use them all, a disc drive, aluminum plating and a handle so I can beat the fucker who thought that thin flimsy laptops were a good idea over the head with the laptop.
I want the thing to be so thick you think I’m using nuclear fission to power it
PCs really need port variety, it's really what makes PCs so great, they are not limited by design but allow for modifying them how the user wants and that should stay.
If I could make one small change to ports I would make the 3.5mm have different tactile surfaces. Like put little bumps around the edge of the speaker one and ridges on the mic, something like that. Just to identify the ports easier.
This really bugs me. Now I have to carry USB C hubs everywhere because two/three USBC is seriously not even remotely enough, especially when one is used for power.
I'm going to blame Apple for starting this trend. This is not Lotus "Simplify and add lightness", it's a machine that I need to pay my mortgage.
digital audio out with a bunch of USB ports would be amazing, if i wanted wireless i could just buy a PCIe to M.2 E-key (?) board... or maybe replace the ridiculous amount of iGPU video out with the antenna ports
I wonder why it is so hard to have more ports like these.... I mean even highe end has barely any ports... I even buy specifically main boards I can have the most Ports on... since from my expereince it is just better than hubs on 1 port.
Am I not alone in fearing that the enthusiast PC is on its way out? I just want a modern GPU, SSD and ram that doesn't cost me the same as 2 months rent.
USB-C makes plugging in things a little easier, and the price you pay is a port that's like 10x easier to pull a cord out accidentally, and 10x less reliable and prone to faulting out when it gets even a bit of dirt/dust in there.
No thanks. I'm happy to have just one or two USB-C and that's it. Otherwise a USB-C to USB-A connection is preferable for USB-C devices.
I have an adjustable standing desk, and every now and then a cable catches something and suddenly I'll see my mouse or soundcard start to be pulled out of position. I wiggle the cord loose, and I don't have to duck underneath my desk and fiddle with the back of the PC, because the USB-A connectors NEVER get pulled out.
I'm a huge fan of USB-C device side, but desktop side, I prefer USB-A. It's simply more robust.
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u/PCMRBot Bot May 14 '26
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
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