Today I was playing a new game, NFS Heat, and I noticed a slight buzzing in my headphones. Kind of like feedback or static. My headphones are connected to a Scarlet 2i2 audio interface. I played for awhile and it was fine except for the static, then I set the game down, walked away, and when I came back the audio interface was toggling power on and off, with a burst of static each time it came on. Weird. So I restart my computer, and when it comes back on, my mouse doesn't work anymore either, and the audio interface seems completely dead.

However, I plug them both into my laptop and they both work great.

My USB keyboard was working, so I swap the ports on everything and find out the problem is with specific USB ports. I think it might be the 3.0 ports but not sure how to tell. They're the ones on the top half of the back of the desktop. All my peripheral devices work, but only in the bottom two USB ports.

I've seen some troubleshooting advice about updating BIOS and drivers and that kind of stuff. But honestly after witnessing the slow death of the one port I had my audio interface plugged into, and the fact everything was working fine and suddenly stopped (as opposed to after an update or something) it really seems like a hardware issue.

So what do we think? New motherboard? Or something else?

I wonder if the new game could have had anything to do with it?

I also have a lot of USB devices plugged in at once, could the power draw have fried the USB controller somehow?