If you have an ASRock gaming motherboard, chances are it comes with a couple of “Lightning Gaming Ports” on the rear for your mouse and keyboard. A “gaming” USB port sounds fancy, but does it actually do anything, or is it just another USB gimmick?
What Is a USB Lightning Gaming Port?
The first association when you hear the words “gaming” and “USB ports” in the same sentence is that these ports have higher bandwidth to handle those fancy high-end 8,000 Hz polling rate mice and keyboards. However, that’s actually not what gaming USB ports are for.
Even at a polling rate of 8K, a mouse and keyboard only require a fraction of the bandwidth (a few Mbit/s) that even a basic USB 2.0 (480 Mbit/s) can provide. In a nutshell, a USB 3.0 or faster port offers no real benefit.
The real advantage that ASRock’s Lightning Gaming Ports promise comes from the fact that these two ports use separate USB controllers. ASRock’s marketing materials don’t go into much detail as to how this works exactly. Still, according to the company’s diagram, one Lightning Port uses the USB controller interface, while the other relies on the PCIe controller interface.
In theory, this allows the mouse and keyboard to use separate paths to communicate with the CPU, reducing controller congestion and jitter, which is the instability in latency caused by inconsistent response times.
The controllers can also prioritize input devices over data-hungry peripherals like webcams and external SSDs, so your mouse and keyboard won’t suffer from stutter or input lag even when streaming or transferring large files in the background.
I couldn’t find any information on whether other motherboard manufacturers have a similar feature.
Still, in theory, these Lightning Gaming Ports aren’t any different from connecting your mouse and keyboard to USB ports that use different controllers—one that’s connected directly to the CPU, and another that’s handled either by the chipset or by a separate USB controller chip, both of which communicate with the CPU over a PCIe uplink. The only difference is that ASRock guarantees the Lightning Gaming Ports use different controllers.
It’s More of a Marketing Gimmick Than a Useful Feature
The main theoretical benefit of these special USB ports is slightly lower input lag, and for competitive gamers, even a few milliseconds can make all the difference between winning and losing a fight. However, do these ports actually hold up to marketing claims?
Well, not really. I’ve tried every combination of USB ports on my ASRock B650M PG Riptide and couldn’t feel any difference using my 240Hz monitor, 8K polling rate mouse, and Hall Effect gaming keyboard.
Don’t take my word for it, though. Linus Tech Tips conducted several click-to-photon latency tests using the ASRock Riptide X570 with an 8K mouse and 4K keyboard and measured zero difference between the Lightning Gaming Ports and the other USB ports on the motherboard. Whether it was a USB 2.0 port, two Lightning Gaming Ports, or a mix of USB 3.2 Gen 1 and Lightning, all tests resulted in a click-to-photon latency of ~49ms.
This is because regular USB ports are already perfectly capable of handling keyboard and mouse inputs, especially when there are no other USB devices consuming bandwidth. Having the mouse and keyboard on separate controllers is highly unlikely to make a meaningful difference in most scenarios.
Moreover, your operating system works with your device drivers to automatically treat HID (Human Interface Device) traffic as high priority. In simple terms, your mouse and keyboard are already at the top of the USB device food chain, so they should operate without interruption.
Use ’em If You’ve Got ’em
We can safely assume that Lightning Gaming Ports are little more than a marketing gimmick that’ll make you feel good about plugging your mouse and keyboard into the motherboard. Whether it’s traffic priority or latency, there just isn’t any practical, provable benefit to using these ports for your peripherals.
If your motherboard doesn’t have a special USB gaming port, there’s no need to go out and buy one that has it, thinking it’ll actually provide an advantage.
However, even if the difference isn’t measurable, it’s still worth plugging your mouse and keyboard into these ports if your motherboard has them. It’s great that ASRock labels the USB ports that sit on separate controllers so you can dedicate them to your most important peripherals.
Even if gaming USB ports rarely make a difference in practice, it’s still reassuring to know that your mouse and keyboard will get priority over high-bandwidth USB devices in the extremely rare cases where a driver bug or system instability prevents the operating system from prioritizing HID devices. That’s why I’ll continue to use them, and you should too if your motherboard has them.
