This shit absolutely sucks. It is by far the worst thing that's happened to me. Literally lost 5-6 years of my life, probably even more because of the stress caused by this. But it's over now, for me at least. Gonna make a TLDR but I strongly advise you to read it all

 

TLDR: Solved the problem. However I had to move out (it is the only solution as of today, for everyone) AND change my entire computer INCLUDING !!! PERIPHERALS !!! (MOUSE, KEYBOARD, etc) and the monitor (not really sure if it was affected but I suspect it)

 

The long version: Well I have to start by saying that weirdly I did not have this problem back when I was a kid, I'm absolutely confident of this. I vividly remember the monitor colors, the image quality in general, the absolutely beautiful (and loud) sound of 50$ headphones back in the day, the very responsive mouse on a shitty 60hz monitor, but moreso I remember being able to type very quickly and the letters showing up on the screen fast and smooth. In fact, I remember this very detail the most out of all of them. Press a key, it immediately shows up. I used this to evolve my leet typing skills and brag to all my friends. Ok so why am I telling you this? It's because I distinctly remember NOT having this problem and i'm SURE that prior to 2014 this shit didn't exist for me. I asked my dad a while ago what could have possibly happened in the apartment building that could cause such a mess. He doesn't remember anything notable, but he said that around 2014 more and more people started installing water heaters in their home (back then most of us got hot water directly from the distributor). For me, that is highly irrelevant because I believe it isn't causative, and it doesn't give me anything to go on how to fix the root of this problem this, but maybe it does for some of you. Also it is very important to note that NOT ONLY it affects the PC, but I noticed it affects the TV, especially if you watch something with a high tempo like sports. I used the same TV later at my sister's apartment with the same TV cable provider, the difference is astonishing, what's funny is that it was my mom that said that it looks "better" there. Not only did it look better but the sound was muuuuch more clearer.  Also, my smartphone: my friend had the same phone which he bought only 2 weeks earlier than me, his runs waaaaaaaaaaaay better than mine (smoother, better animations, faster processing), we're talking about a Galaxy S9 Plus. I even compared it once side by side with the same youtube 1080p 60fps video running in the background. I'm tech savvy so don't say stuff like "maybe it was the apps slowing it down" No, trust me, it wasn't. I only had essential apps & maybe netflix on there while my friend's phone was 1gb away from being full.

 

 I was (and still am, to some extent) a guy who loved competitive FPS games more than anything else, however I did not become fully aware of the problem being outside of my computer until late 2017. From time to time I would go to friends' house and play on their computers and just be amazed by the sheer smoothness of the gameplay. I always wondered "Well how is this so smooth? The PC is certainly worse than the one I have home" but I kinda always dismissed it as some kind of placebo. I put thousands of hours into CS:GO, even got as far as being in a team ranked 40 on HLTV (cs players will know what im talking about). So yeah, I was pretty decent. Decent, but I could never evolve past that point due to this handicap. It was fucking devastating, knowing that you're playing (and beating) guys that most certainly don't have this problem, their pc's running smoothly while yours was extremely bipolar, couldn't decide between "high input lag" or "extremely high input lag".

 

Thousands of euros later, in 2017 I found some nvidia thread talking about input lag and electricity being related. As most of you have, I dismissed it and laughed saying stuff like lol how crazy are these guys? Ironic, yeah. I started by stupidly changing my PSU. Immediately made a difference but as you probably guessed, didn't last long. Changed my internet provider, twice. "OMG its fixed now" no it isn't. Changed my outlet. Nada. Even made an entirely new circuit from the breaker. Nothing. I paid some electric company to come check my apartment, multiple times. "Yeah, there's nothing wrong, it's perfectly fine" they all said. Even made a circuit separate from the neighbors to the main building breaker.

 

Don't even let me mention the amount of software-sided tweaks like bios and windows optimizations, all "having an effect" until 5 mins later when either it started acting up again or the placebo ended. In fact, I think the software debugging phase was longer than the hardware & electrical replacing one, I turned Windows inside out, know every single bit of tweak you can make to your PC, I still have nightmares with the clock timer from time to time. My suspicion of it being electrical, or more precisely, external (as in, not necessarily the PC's fault) was confirmed when I took my PC to a friend's house and there it ran well. It ran well, I could definetely tell, but I'm only saying 'well' because I still had that lingering feeling that it's not perfect because when he had his PC plugged in, it was noticeably smoother. I just said it's a light placebo. Anyway

 

In 2019 an e-sports cafe / internet / gaming lounge or whatever you wanna call it opened up in my city. Basically a place with ~20-25 gaming pc's where you go to play. I knew the owner so I was there very often, like 4 times a week. My gameplay experience there was amazing, but something was still off. The game was still weird and enemies were still only a bit faster than me and my bullets had a brain of their own. I could still play very well, but not to my maximum. Had around ~3900-4000 elo that time (top 100 EU on faceit). Many many months later I go there to meet & play with a friend who was in a match already, he had to go to the bathroom and he told me to play a few rounds. I put my hand on the mouse and WTF? this feels amazing, what settings did he change? I played on that exact PC just 3 days ago. When he comes back he says he hasn't made any tweaks to nvidia or to the game, which confused the fuck out of me. A few weeks later, when I was in a party of 5 (basically playing side by side) looking left and right and seeing their games being waaaaaaay smoother than mine I said to a friend: let's switch places, don't ask why just let's switch. Yeah, as you can guess that PC ran perfectly while the one I was previously on was terrible, he was complaining the entire match "man this is so laggy what did u do?" Only THEN it clicked. Almost all the times I went there I brought my mouse and keyboard from home. 

 

I immediately tested this, along with my friends to absolutely discard the possibility of it being a placebo. I put my mouse and keyboard in, the game becomes shit in minutes, not only the game but it gives the monitor a weird, choppy look as if you had negative anti-aliasing, maybe some of you know what I'm talking about. Oh and the sound becomes lightly... muffled? I don't know what the word is, but the sound quality (and loudness) decreases. I plug them out, put the m&k that was there by default. Mouse lags for 2 seconds, but the feeling subsides and it's back to perfect. You heard it right! THE MOUSE AND KEYBOARD (and possibly the headphones and whatever was inserted in my pc from home) WERE MAKING OTHER PC'S, PERFECTLY FINE PC'S WITH GOOD ELECTRICITY, LAG !!! This discovery changed everything for me. I bought a mouse that I would never plug in at home, only at the gaming lounge and used the keyboard that was there. Never had one more input lag problem for as long as I was there.

 

Side notes: All the PC components I have used in the past were high-end. Always the newest i7's, modular gold/platinum/whatever rated PSUs, flagship motherboards, 200$ keyboards, 200$ headphones, and all the mice I have used since 2016 have been wireless. Namely: Logitech G900, Logitech G305, Logitech G903, Logitech G Pro Wireless, and lately Razer Viper Ultimate. 

 

However, the problems were far from over for me. I moved out in 2019 for a few months. The electricity in that apartment was fine. But something was still off. I used different peripherals and monitor but didn't change the PC. Enemies were still extremely fast, tracking was off; looking at demos I could see that I clearly had a small delay, one that other players didn't. Don't get me wrong, it was hundreds of times better than it was at home, but it wasn't perfect. I borrow my friend's PC for a week and his pc was running as a normal PC should. His PC was kinda old and I had ~150-200FPS in CS (which is on the lower side) BUT it was extremely responsive. The game was stuttering from time to time due to the cpu reaching high temps (shitty cooler) but it was MILLIONS of times more responsive than my PC which had 500-600FPS. Week ends, I give his PC back and go back to my buggy machine, spend a few more weeks and $$$ changing pc parts to no avail. I could never get that perfect feeling. I go back home and stay there for one more summer and fall, then move out again for a semester. That apartment had bad electricity, almost even worse than the one I had home. When you turned off the lights, the TV signal would screw up and make the screen flicker for a quarter of a second. Didn't notice it when I moved because I was in a rush and didn't think this problem was widespread. PC was running just as bad as at home. I was in hell again. And worse: I used the "clean" mouse & whatever other peripherals I had in that house as well as the newer PC components that I just bought half a year ago.

 

Surprised I never saw a post about this, but let's summarize: Bad electricity ruins mice/keyboards/headsets as well as some specific (or all, but I doubt it) PC components. I'm gonna call the affected elements 'dirty' and the ones that are fine 'clean'. There was some guy from Brazil saying stuff like he went to LANs with his stuff (not the computer) and the problem was still persisting. He wasn't bullshitting at all, it's 100% true. You'd sound like an idiot normally if you'd say this but it's absolutely, one hundo percent genuine. Everything that you plugged in a PC that was plugged in an outlet whose circuit was 'dirty' is subject to this cancer. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't! This is why it's extremely hard to even get help from someone that is well informed and very proficient in the 'electrical' category. If I'd read this a few years ago I would never believe a word of it. And no one will take this seriously. And why would they? It's something that cannot be measured/quantifiable, we have tried countless programs and stuff like multimeters and whatnot. I strongly believe that every measurement that you guys have correlated with this problem is purely anectodal, no offense. Normal means cannot assess this.

 

PCs or peripherals ruined by electricity won't 'recover', however they are a lot better in a 'clean' environment (i.e. clean electricity), but not perfect, it's not viable for high-end competitive gaming. Unfortunately I never got to the bottom of which PC components (if not all) are permanently affected by electricity. I also found out that this problem is not uncommon here, I found at least 3 guys whose houses I've been to and personally confirmed that they have the electricity problem. One of them is a friend of mine who also has a mouse that exhibits the 'dirty mouse' symptoms: whenever he plugs that mouse in a 'clean' pc (i.e. gaming lounge PCs) it starts with the weird symptoms. There were other guys as well, but their problems lied in bad windows optimizations/bad temps. Yeah, here everyone and their mother is playing CS or at least some kind of competitive online game, so I have a lot of friends who are gamers. Come to think of it, I think A LOT of people worldwide have this problem but they don't know it exists because they've never played on a well-functioning PC to see what perfect conditions are like. Which is pretty sad to be honest.

 

Bottom line: Moving out to a 'clean' house won't solve your problems 100%. You have to buy an entirely new PC, peripherals (probably including monitor as well) and, to be safe, any and every auxiliary cable like ethernet and power cable (PSU and monitor). Frequency/Voltage is irrelevant. This problem has been reported from the US all the way to the other side of the world in Japan/Australia. 230V, 120V, 50hz 60hz 10000hz it doesnt matter it's all the same so the problem is somewhere else. People have claimed that buying a Furman conditioner fully fixes the problem which I highly doubt because it doesn't fix the components already 'infested'. Ferrites or whatever they're called won't help. Neither will turning off Wi-Fi or whatnot. And most of all STOP SEARCHING FOR A SOFTWARE-RELATED SOLUTION. TWEAKING THAT WINDOWS/BIOS SETTING WON'T FIX YOUR PROBLEM. THE PROBLEM LIES OUTSIDE OF YOUR COMPUTER!!! Yes, some things MAY make a difference but it's all either temporary or placebo. For the love of god and for your sake, stop spending so much time and money searching for a solution in a place where hundreds of people have searched extensively MANY years before you because it will not help. Wait a few weeks before claiming "OMG SOLUTION!!11"

 

P.P.S. Everything I said I believe to be 100% true, there are no doubts and my credibility stands in the fact that (apparently) I'm the only guy here with access to dozens of PCs close to home that I can easily access and troubleshoot. I also genuinely believe that while the problem may not manifest 100% the same for every guy that's affected, the root of the issue is identical for everyone. I gladly welcome counter-claims and I'm sorry for not giving you the answer you probably wanted.