Your Motherboard Has 3 USB Upgrades Hiding in Plain Sight
I love building PCs, but I will admit that I do not know anyone who finds motherboards thrilling outside of people who work with them for a living. Everyone else is focused on GPUs and CPUs and complaining about high prices. However, at a time like this when prices are indeed high, it is worth looking at upgrades you already have sitting right under your nose. I am talking about the internal USB headers on your motherboard.
Internal Hubs Exist
Before getting any deeper into the weeds here, let us talk about what USB 2.0 headers even are.
They are one of those small 9-pin blocks along the bottom edge of your motherboard. Each one accounts for two USB ports, and you likely have at least two of these headers on a standard motherboard (though do not take this as a given). That gives you up to four internal USB 2.0 ports before you have even plugged anything in, and that sounds like a lot, but you will probably need more than you think.
So, for the first item on this list, let us discuss an underrated “motherboard hack” that turns one header into more ports. The hack is a USB hub, but internal.
What does it do? Well, roughly what you would expect it to do. It turns one of those 9-pin headers into four, giving you a lot more places to use your motherboard. These hubs sell for around $20 to $30 and are basically small magnetic bricks that do not take up visible space and can be hidden inside the case with great success. Even if you are into PC aesthetics (like I am), you will not notice one of these.
Boosting the port count is only one part of the equation, though; the real win is the SATA power connector on the side. Motherboard headers are designed to supply around 500mA per port, so a passive splitter is only going to split all that power between four different devices, ultimately not supplying enough to all four. Likewise, you probably do not want to plug a portable SSD into a USB hub, because it is splitting power and data transfer between multiple devices when your SSD needs the full attention. Getting one of these hubs means that you are getting power from the PSU instead, provided you are using a hub with SATA power.
The reason you want this is that it allows you to run out of those ports quickly. The front panel takes up one port, an AIO with a pump head hides one, and if it has an RGB controller, that can take another.
But Not for Everything
This one works in the reverse direction to the hub. You are probably not going to squeeze more devices onto a header; you are going to take a header your case never uses and turn it into ports you can actually do something with. All that you need is a slot plate adapter, which runs you around $10 to $15, and it plugs right into a spare 9-pin or 19-pin header at one end, then fills an empty PCIe slot cutout on the other.
If your mobo came with two USB 3.0 headers and your case only has one front panel cable to go into them, which is common for many mid-towers, this is worth trying out. In case you have run out of headers entirely, PCIe x1 cards can add two more with their own SATA power.
If you do this, there is one caveat to be aware of. USB 3.0 raises the noise floor in the 2.4GHz band, and that can affect the sensitivity of any wireless receiver in its vicinity. You might be using that for your mouse or keyboard if they are wireless, so you could see performance issues if you use the dongle alongside one of these.
Add a USB-C Port to a Case That Never Came With One
There is a fair chance that your motherboard has a USB-C header that you have never even used. It is a 20-pin block known as Type-E, or Key A depending on who wrote the manual. Its whole purpose is to power a front panel USB-C port on your case. Most modern motherboards have one, perhaps almost all of them, but older cases may not have one to match, so they never had a USB-C port to go into it. A slot bracket can fix that whole problem.
Once you have one, plug it into the Type-E header, and you will get a proper USB-C socket on an empty PCIe slot cutout around the back, which beats the option of putting an adapter off a Type-A port until you upgrade your PC. Which, given current market conditions, may not happen anytime soon.
Read the Manual Before Shopping for Upgrades
All of these lesser-known upgrades save you the trouble of using an adapter plugged by way of USB port and traipse it inside the case. But before you go shopping for gear, make sure you need them and that they will work with your motherboard and/or case.
Check out the Corsair internal 4-port USB 2.0 hub if your mobo’s two USB 2.0 headers are already spoken for by the front panel and an AIO. This SATA-powered hub turns one of them into four 9-pin ports and sticks magnetically wherever you want.
