I've tried three different PCs, monitors, mice, keyboards, internet connections, updates, and every setting I could think of, but games still feel like they have obvious input lag at home. When I played at another house using a different PC, the gameplay felt much more responsive. Could the electrical supply in my home be responsible? If so, what specific fault—such as grounding, voltage fluctuations, or a bad neutral—could cause this? I also had an electrician inspect things, but they didn't find an obvious problem.
4 Answers
A quality UPS can help protect a PC and may reveal whether severe voltage problems are involved, but it isn’t a guaranteed cure for input lag. If the UPS changes nothing, focus on measuring actual latency and troubleshooting the computer, display, and network rather than assuming the electricity is dirty.
Electricity is very unlikely to be the cause of ordinary input lag. Bad power usually leads to crashes, resets, instability, or hardware problems rather than consistently delayed controls. The PC itself still needs to be investigated, including its specifications, game settings, frame times, drivers, chipset drivers, BIOS settings, and memory timings.
The comparison test doesn’t isolate the cause because both the computer and the environment changed. Try taking one of your own PCs, along with the same monitor and peripherals, to the other house. If the lag disappears there, then checking the home’s wiring, grounding, and voltage with proper test equipment would make sense—but an electrician not finding a fault makes that explanation less likely.
Start by collecting the exact specifications of the affected PCs and the system that felt good, then test one variable at a time. Check for high frame-time spikes, incorrect refresh rate, V-Sync or buffering settings, wireless interference, driver issues, and CPU or GPU throttling. Also consider that fatigue or expectations can make small delays feel much more noticeable.
A simple way to test the power theory is to use the same PC at another location. Comparing two different PCs can’t tell you whether the original computer or the house is responsible.