USBs and charging speeds

NutterzUK

NutterzUK

NutterzUK

Associate
Joined
18 Feb 2010
Posts
940
Hi,

As the title suggests, I found some USBs seem to charge my phone a lot slower than others. I would have expected some kind of standard across USBs, although I know there are some "powered USB hubs",.. and also that Apple products sometimes show a warning that some USBs don't provide enough power.

Is there a difference with different cables?
I was also wondering, I have a USB which is on my keyboard, one in the monitor, some on the front of my PC and some on the back. Why is my PC so (SO SO SO) slow at charging my phone whichever socket I plug it into? The USB charger which goes straight into the mains ( the adapter that comes with HTCs ) seems to charge my One X really fast. The keyboard... if I plug it into the keyboard it doesn't even seem enough to turn on the phone.

Is there a way to kind of... power up the USBs on the front of my PC?
 
USB sockets on a PC or similiar hardware will only supply 500ma max (its not safe to increase it) some will be data wired only and have no active power connections and depending on whats also plugged in via USB, quality of the components, etc. the actual power they can provide to your phone will vary a lot.

The mains adapter will be providing in the region of 750ma to 1amp on most modern phones so much faster and I seem to get better results from the battery when charged with the mains adapter than when "trickle" charged from a PC or similiar USB connection.
 
There's a good explanation of USB power on Wikipedia. Wall USB plugs can supply more juice (2A iirc) than a standard USB 2.0 port

From your sig I see you have an MSI X58M

MSI UK said:
i-Charger
Mobile consumer appliances are getting more and more attention in current day fast moving life style, with smart phones and tablets almost becoming a fashion accessory. However, many ordinary personal computers cannot charge some of these devices, making it difficult to stay connected. The MSI i-Charger is a Windows resident program capable of revising the power supply mode of your USB port to become more powerful. Once your phone or tablet is connected to your USB port, the i-Charger sends a signal to initiate its charging circuit, making it a really smart and convenient charging solution for mobile computing needs.

Features
- Automatically Detect & Charge Your Smart Phone or Tablet
- Support Microsoft Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista/7 32Bit
Click to expand...

Have you installed that?
 
If you have a laptop sometimes one of the USB sockets will be listed in the manual specifically as the "powered" or "active" USB slot and these will be a single socket on its own root hub thats got the full 500ma and not sharing with anything else and would be the best bet other than buying another adapter.


EDIT: Nice spot d_brennen I'd forgotten some manufacturers had started doing that.
 
I'm on a Gigabyte G1 sniper now but I'll try seeing if I can find something similar, that looks really good.

I have a laptop but I mainly charge from my desktop where I work. The front USBs are the one I tend to use which are plugged into the USB header on the motherboard, with nothing else plugged in to them.

My motherboard supports the "On/Off" charge which is supposed to also be 40% faster.
Info about on/off charge

However,.. it's so slow,. it's unreal actually how slow it is.
I plug it in for about an hour.. and when I unplug it will usually say around 5%-10%.

Thanks again Rroff
( Edit: Just saw your message come up before mine... perhaps the same On/off thing we have... why could mine be so slow? )
 
Oh,... some time ago ( although I already had this problem ) I disabled something in the bios to disable the on/off functionality. The reason is that my QPAD MK-85 which is plugged into one of the rear sockets has LEDs on it. These LEDs are always on even when the PC is off which is irritating and no doubt kills the life of it. So for that reason I turned it off.
 
You may need to expressly set the charging level in your BIOS, Advanced Chipset Features or similar. I've seen ON/OFF charge type features disabled by default if I remember correctly
 
Ok. On a side note them.. I guess...

Does anyone know a way to make the QPAD MK-85 keyboard lights turn off with the PC if the ON/OFF charge is enabled?
I guess this would fix my problem also.
 
I don't think all the USB ports are ON/OFF Charge enabled, on most motherboards anyway. Does your motheboard manual state which ones are special and which vanilla?

Another option would be a £5 USB 2.0 PCI card ;)
 
I *believe* (But need to look up to double check) that all the back ones are on/off charge enabled. I then plugged in the front headers for USB3 and USB2.0 into the USB headers which had on/off enabled. There are some extra ones that don't have it enabled and I could go in and move it over... but then I would also have to plug my keyboard into one of those front sockets which isn't really ideal... but I guess is a solution to allowing me to re-enable on/off charge.

Even when it was enabled though, my phone still charged super slow. Maybe it was 40% faster than it currently is,.. i'm not sure... but the speed it is now is so slow I think another 40% would make little difference.

At the time of my first post my One X had no batteries.
Now... it has just enough to show the blinking light, which means it is charging but has not enough to turn on yet.
When it's plugged in to the wall, I can just turn it on straight away with no fuss.
 
My Gigabyte board has a header to allow the two front ports to be powered. These are the ones where I usually charge my phone/external battery. All the USB 2.0 ports on the back are powered as well, the only ones that aren't powered are the Etron controlled 3.0 ports (disabled since they're rubbish).

When my PC is off though, my headset controller stays on. The lights on my mouse however stays off, although if I spam the buttons for a while it does come on... And to charge my phone, I need to connect it to the PC after it's off, not during the PC shutdown (then it drains the battery).

Before it never use to do this, the ON/OFF Charge was flakey, but after updaing my BIOS it sorted it out.

So it works, but it's not really perfect... Would be nice if I had the option to choose which ports to have the feature enabled...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom