Range of Xbox One controller USB dongle?

This is game related… playing games…

Curious if anybody here uses one of the USB wireless receivers for Xbox One controllers with a PC.

I was thinking about building a HTPC and gaming setup. One of my Xbox Ones is in my AV closet which is about 20 or 25 feet from the big couch in the living room, and if you know anything about the latest gen of controllers (PS4 is even worse, I’ve read), that’s too far and it suffers from frequent controller disconnects.

I’m wondering if the external dongles fare any better than whatever receiver is inside the console. Probably a wild shot in the dark but hey, asking is free. (And they’re only about $20 or so… if nobody knows I guess I’ll roll the dice and try it.)

I have used the Xbox One controller with the wireless dongle, and the range is excellent with it. I have had excellent results with the PS4 controller as well, but I used a BlueTooth unit built into the motherboard for that.

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i really never had range problems with either the xbox or the use dongle for my computer. Do you have a lot of interference maybe?

My other XBone is in the living room behind the small TV, maybe 16 feet from the couch. It occasionally disconnects. The AV closet one (which drives the projector and big audio) will disconnect every few minutes. MS quotes a 19 foot range but serious connection problems at much shorter ranges have been fairly well-documented. On top of that my home definitely has a lot of RFI.

It’s a shame, the Xbox 360 had amazing range. I could walk 130 feet to the mailbox and stay connected.

Good to know, Shiloh, I’ll give it a shot.

Any reason why you don’t want to use a 360 controller on the HTPC if that solves the range issue?

Does your setup maybe allow the wireless usb dongle to be placed closer to the couch using a USB repeater cable?

Crazy talk! No, I hadn’t actually thought about using a 360 controller. I suppose I should dig around on Steam and figure out which controllers are commonly supported these days. I kind of assumed everyone was probably moving away from the 360, but maybe not?

The setup is very frustrating for me. I have this big roomy AV closet with fancy racks and miles of wiring, but the home builder’s low-volt guys ignored a lot of my requirements so the masses of network cabling are in the wrong wall and probably make a really great RF shield… worse, a lot of the wiring is buried between the second floor and first floor ceiling – under a staircase. Very difficult to change anything or run new wiring. They also ignored my request to use “smurf tube” which would have made it easier to pull new cabling. That being said, once the weather cools down I plan a massive wiring upgrade effort this fall and winter, so maybe a repeater cable will make it into the mix…

I doubt game-support for the 360 controllers will go away any time soon. If you are a PC gamer and own a 360 controller, there is no compelling need to upgrade that I’m aware of. So why would devs stop supporting them? Afaik they should work with any game that has generic DirectX gamepad-support anyway. If you are looking for a gamepad application that allows you to make mouse+keyboard input via gamepad, I can recommend “Controller Companion” on steam. I used it to map f12 on the xbox home button to be able to take screenshots in games without reaching for the keyboard. It can do plenty of other things too.

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Thanks! Good points about the 360.

Controller Companion is pretty cool. I’d have killed for that at my old house when I was really into home automation (which seems really cool but ends up being a lot of work for marginal conveniences). In fact, I have another machine in the closet dedicated to our surveillance cameras and I’ve been meaning to automate access to that… this should make it dead easy. Awesome.

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Another thing you can do is connect your wireless dongle to a USB extension cable, and then move the wireless dongle to a location that provides the best range. Wireless signals degrade if they need to go through a TV or computer case.

The strange part is I have no problem getting 2GHz or 5GHz wifi anywhere in the house or yard. The router is in the AV closet which is nearly centrally located. The furthest 2GHz wifi camera is about 85 feet away and it has a strong steady signal. (They’ll get hard-wired this fall/winter, too, when I can get into the attic and not immediately die of heat exhaustion.) In fact, I recently upgraded to the Netgear Nighthawk X8 MIMO router and 5GHz signals are amazingly powerful hundreds of feet into the yard.

I’ve noticed Xbox One controllers are seriously sensitive to all kinds of interference though. For example, it always disconnects a second or two before my cellphone rings. I’ve read that it uses both the 2.4 and 5.2 GHz bands virtually guaranteeing a worst-case scenario for interference. I can’t imagine what they were thinking when they designed these things.