Max length for USB cable from computer to breakout?

[JMnITup]

TL;DR: is there a max length for the USB cable between computer and breakout box, and has anyone gotten the Vive to work with 3m/15ft ish USB cable here?

I have my computer in the corner of a large room, and running with the provided cables (about 1-2? ft usb cable from comp to breakout) significantly limits my range due to the Vive cord's length.

So i thought, simple, buy a new HDMI and usb cable, and go.

I bought a high speed USB 3.0 cable and and High speed HDMI cable, about 15-16 feet each (I think the HDMI is 15 and the usb is 16.4 ft, or close to). Moving this to a center of an edge allowed me to cover the room far better, to where the size limitation would be the max distance between base stations.

Unfortunately, I hooked it up, and when I do and turn on VR, everything slows to a crawl. VR Compositor (32 bit) uses 17-18% of my quad-core hyperthreaded processor (looking at the per CPU graphs, it's basically maxing out one of the logical processors), and the Steam Room Setup utility runs VERY slowly.. say it usually shows it's animations at 40-50 fps, it now shows them at 2-3. It also functions just as slowly... pointing the controller at the monitor moves the bar slowly, and instead of a rapid and increasing tempo rumble, it just makes slow clicking sound (basically, scaled down in the same way the FPS is). When I move to room sizing, the headset shows up in the display, but neither controller ever do (even though the SteamVr mini window shows both tracking).

Additionally, Steam itself is slow to respond.. movies it plays are choppy, scrolling is choppy rather than smooth, etc.

I unplugged the HDMI cable from the breakout box, no change... but when I unplug the USB cable from the box, everything goes back to normal. When I re-connect it, goes back to the bad state.

I tried various ports, both USB 3.0 (which I had started with), and USB 2.0 (which I didn't expect to fair any better, but figured I'd try), total of about 6 ports in all across 2 separate IO cards, same results. With the provided/short cable, this was ok in the USB 3.0 ports (although, I will note that if I turn the front camera on, things work well at first but then I lose headset tracking pretty regularly, have to turn off and back on overlay to get it back usually, then it goes again... this was in the 'working' configuration)

So, it's possible I have a bad 16' USB cable... rather than buying another, though, I am curious if anyone has been able to get a long cable to work, or if the length itself is causing me issues (which will make my setup really annoying to deal with :/ ).

Thoughts?

[Maj.Headache]

This might help> https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4dq00o/what_worked_for_me_extending_pc_vive_30_ft/

[JMnITup]

That may help, but before moving to a cat5 solution, I'd really rather try to get normal cables to work. The complexity of going from a longer cable to an over Cat5 solution is a bit of a jump as well as additional cost...

It seems like the USB cable works ok, but the HDMI may be the limiter. From an NVidia GTX 980Ti, I attach the supplied HDMI cable to the card, and the 16.8foot USB cable, and I believe it works. I attach the 15' HDMI cable I got (Ultra4kx2k quality), and I get the maxed Compositor task and slowdown. It took a while to verify, because I had to reboot between every variable change, since once it got in a bad state, restarting SteamVR, unplugging/replugging everything, etc, even previously good configurations are bad, so it is a little frustrating to troubleshoot.

But apparently, having a long and/or bad HDMI cable does consistently cause those symptoms, at least in my case. It's possible I have a bad or low quality cable (though I tried to buy high quality to avoid that issue, but have to rely on what the seller claims). I'm still struggling to find a solution, but may resort to the cat5 extender if I have to... :/

It would be nice if any of this was discussed or stated in normal support, though. Knowing the length limit of the Vive's attached cables, I would have thought testing would have been done on various configurations extending distance between PC and breakout box. :(

[Bluebrad]

i need a replacement where can i buy one? is this a standard male to male?

[The Warped Avenger]

hey man if you havent got this worked out heres the deal. im running a 25 foot hdmi and a 30 foot usb to my breakout. the thing that's shutting you down is gonna be the need for a legit Active 4k hdmi and a rated usb 3.0 cable and pay attention to the hdmi ends because its really intended to be mono directional so display and source should be labeled

[CrazyLikeWoah]

If it helps anyone at all, I've had issues in the past connecting my Vive through a USB 3.0 connection, and found that USB 2.0 was significantly more reliable. One possible explanation is that USB 3.0 in some cases can interfere with the 2.4GHz wireless devices (i.e. Vive controllers).
If I remember correctly, I was experiencing trouble with getting both the controllers and the headset display to work simultaneously. As soon as I got one connected, the other would disconnect.

Sources:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/universal-serial-bus/usb3-frequency-interference-paper.html

[Zero]

I got this 50 Foot HDMi and 50 Foot USB and it works great. Computer upstairs vive downstairs in my large room.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BZC38OW/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GLZYG6M/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Here is a good chart of cable on reddit for vive extensions. My review is down on the StarTech Active 15m.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/wiki/cables