I love building PCs, but I don’t know anybody, myself included, who finds motherboards that exciting (outside of people who work with them for a living, I guess). It’s all GPUs and CPUs, and complaining about outrageous prices.
But at a time like this, when prices are indeed awful, it’s nice to discover potential upgrades you already own. They’re all hidden on your motherboard. I’m talking about its internal USB headers.
Internal hubs exist
Before getting any deeper into the weeds here, let’s discuss what USB 2.0 headers even are.
They’re one of those small 9-pin blocks along the bottom edge of your motherboard. Each one accounts for two USB ports, and you’ll usually find two of those headers on a typical motherboard (although don’t take this as a law). That adds up to four internal USB 2.0 ports before you’ve even plugged anything in, and that sounds like loads, but you may need more than you’d think.
So, for the first item on this list, let’s talk about a huge “motherboard hack,” which is turning one header into more ports. The hack is a USB hub, but internal.
What does it do? Well, kind of what you’d expect it to do. It turns one of those 9-pin headers into four, giving you a lot more space to make use of your motherboard. These can be bought for around $20-$30, and they’re essentially small magnetic bricks that don’t take up space and can be hidden within the case with great success. Even if you’re obsessed with PC aesthetics (like I am), you won’t notice one of these.
Boosting the port count is just one part of the equation, though; the real challenge is the SATA power connector on the side. Mobo headers are designed to supply around 500mA per port, so a passive splitter is just going to split all that power between four different devices, ultimately not supplying enough to all four. In a similar vein, you probably don’t want to plug a portable SSD into a USB hub, because it’s splitting power and data transfer between multiple devices when your SSD needs all the attention. Getting one of these hubs means that you’re getting power from the PSU instead, provided you’re using a hub with SATA power.
The reason you might need this is that you can run out of those ports pretty quickly. The front panel takes up one port, an AIO with a pump screen takes a header of its own, and if it has an RGB controller, that could take another.
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This one works in the opposite direction to the hub. You’re not going to squeeze more devices onto a header; you’re going to take a header your case never used and turn it into ports you can actually do something with. All you need is a slot plate adapter, which will run you around $10 to $15, and it plugs into a spare 9-pin or 19-pin header at one end, then fills an empty PCIe slot cover at the other.
If your mobo came with two USB 3.0 headers and your case only has one front panel cable to plug into them, which can be true for many mid-towers, this is worth checking out. If you’ve run out of headers entirely, PCIe x1 cards can add two more with their own SATA power.
If you do this, there’s one caveat to be mindful of. USB 3.0 raises the noise floor in the 2.4GHz band, and that can hurt the sensitivity of any wireless receiver in its vicinity. You’re probably using that for your mouse or keyboard if they’re wireless, so you may notice huge performance problems if you use the dongle with one of these.
Add a USB-C port to a case that never came with one
Credit: Tim Brookes / How-To Geek
There’s a good chance that your motherboard has a USB-C header that you’ve never even used. It’s a 20-pin block called Type-E, or Key A depending on who was in charge of writing the manual. Its entire point is to drive a front panel USB-C port on your case. Most current motherboards have one, maybe even nearly all of them, but older cases may not have one to match, so they never had a USB-C port to plug into it. A slot bracket can fix that entire problem.
Once you have one, plug it into the Type-E header, and you’ll get a proper USB-C socket on an empty PCIe slot cover round the back, which beats the alternative of hanging an adapter off a Type-A port until you upgrade your PC. Which, given the current market conditions, may not happen anytime soon.
Read the manual before shopping for upgrades
All of these lesser-known upgrades spare you the trouble of using an inferior alternative plugged via USB port, and move it inside the case. But before you get shopping for accessories, make sure you even need them, and that they’ll work with your motherboard and/or case.