Why in the name of Bill Gates' furry man-ovaries are your headphones USB? You know that bypasses your onboard sound, right?
Why in the name of Bill Gates' furry man-ovaries are your headphones USB? You know that bypasses your onboard sound, right?
i was just thinking that i have 14 usb 2.0 ports between my case and mobo... and only 2 usb 3.... =?
Not dead yet
Very few devices are USB3. It's only a few months old. Which is why the max amount of USB3 board on a mobo is four. Need more, add-in card is currently the only way to go.
Didn't see it mentioned here, but ps2 cables can be long....very long....very very long. while USB is limited to about a little under 20 feet or something like that.
Without some sort of hub/extender:
USB 1.1: 10 feet
USB 2.0: 16 feet
USB 3.0: ?? feet
My headset is USB. The sound quality is much better than the onboard Realtek HD Audio, and the sound quality will be the same on any computer (It's the Creative Fatal1ty headset).
When I do eventually get a decent sound card, I'll get regular non-USB headphones to use with my computer. I'll probably still use the USB with my laptop and most other computers, though.
Don't forget there is a limit to the number of sounds a device can render at once.
most of them USB headsets are 16 sounds, with a few being 24.
Realtek HD is 32 sounds/ standard realtek is 16. and VIA being 8 (lol)
Most creative cards handle 64 voices, the X-fi's and my azuentec handle 128 voices.
Lemme tell you there is a HUGE HUGE difference between 16 voices and 128 voices.
Did you know you can hear the rain on GTA all the time, not just when your walking?
i never knew that until i installed the azuentec card and the audio of the rain wasn't cut off by people talking, walking, the car engine, skids radio and effects.....from the 24 voice limit
Creative.... SBLive...
Now I want another one.
I might have one in a box unused. I have to do some sorting, if I've got it I'll set it aside. Does me no good.
I don't know many people who hot swap keyboards. In fact, my experience is that interface devices (specifically keyboard and mouse) sometimes work poorly and require some OS massaging or even a reboot when hotswapped, regardless whether or not they're USB.
True, USB cable connectors are physically superior ... they still can and still do break, though seemingly less often then PS/2 pins did. My anecdotal experience, however, is that USB ports themselves break far more often than PS/2 ports do - although it's possible that's just a symptom of modern industrial corner-cutting or a greater number of clumsy idiot users stubbornly forcing the connectors on "backwards". I've only seen a few mobos with broken PS/2 ports, but I've seen a great many with some broken/nonfunctional USB ports.
PS/2 always runs some kind of hardwired 8042 emulator on the (slow) "Southbridge" or "Super I/O" chipset component. USB HID services also run on the same 8042 circuitry (or on some other chip for add-on USB hubs/controllers), after enumerating and translating data through a variety of USB logic ... in theory this means that it is at best the same speed (though more likely it is slower) and automatically uses more power and circuits and mobo resources than the straight PS/2 counterpart.
Performance ... more USB functions plugged into more USB controllers means more power and more processing, the computer is busier. True, a keyboard and mouse (or even the usual pile of common USB gizmos) is fairly trivial in terms of raw number crunching and wattage ... but it all adds up, and on USB it's all dividing resources (clocks, power, bandwidth) somewhere on the mobo, no matter how cleverly things are designed. PS/2 has fixed protocol/bandwidth/power allocations, it is constant while USB busses fluctuate. A fancy gaming keyboard might advertise incredibly "fast" USB polling, which means nothing because the polling is still bottlenecked by 8042 compatibility - and by software (USB HID libraries, OS, etc). Bandwidth on PS/2 devices does not "stutter" and "burst" and get interrupted by varying loads on a shared bus, and they do not fail when other devices on the shared bus crash or lock up.
PS/2 supports true unlimited NKRO, although functionally limited to about 8KRO and ~112.25wpm max typing speed in practice (and likely much less on today's cheapass keyboards). USB is designed to support a maximum of 6KRO (although, again, this really doesn't matter much these days).
Final point for PS/2 ... no matter how wonky and screwy and busted up and cantankerous a computer might be, no matter how fried the USB services might be, even if it's at the chipset-level, the PS/2 is so deeply embedded and hardwired that you can almost always access the BIOS with a PS/2 keyboard when no USB keyboard can possibly work. If nothing else, it's at least another layer of redundancy for "bare bones" system repair.
Of course, having said all that ... a USB keyboard or mouse can provide additional functions above and beyond the basics; anything digital is possible, assuming it can be computed on 100-500mA or less. In reality this means nothing, it's basically just piggybacking multiple USB devices (such as, say, a slaved USB controller hub, an audio chipset, a little BT transceiver, or a LCD screen) within a single keyboard/mouse component. PS/2 cannot do any of this stuff, of course. Personally, I prefer to keep my hardware inside the main PC chassis plugged into proper slots on the mobo, where it belongs and where it will offer maximum performance and capability ... but at the same time, sometimes the convenience or bling or "coolness" of stuff integrated in the keyboard/mouse is nice to have.
If your PS/2 is just too offensive then plug in one of those PS/2-to-USB "keyboard" adapter thingies and use it as a constant 5V power source for recharging USB devices.
My mind says Technic, but my body says Duplo.