I need a USB 3 extension cable for my webcams. Will a regular 10’ extension be fine or do I need to get an active/powered cable?
should be fine, but for about the same money you can get cheap converters that use CAT5/6 and will often let you run up to 100 ft.
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Such as?
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Thanks I’ll look at those
Will most likely work fine with 10’ extension. I’ve had good luck with Cable Matters brand.
Or about half the price is you only need 2.0
These seem to be USB 2.0 only. Finding one that supports USB 3 is not easy. It would seem that Ethernet should be able to handle the duties of USB 3 quite easily.
ahh yeah no you wont find cheap ones for USB 3. Sure the cable can do it, but the electronics on either end tend to be $$$$.
The cheapest reliable one for that I have found is about $1000.
Yeh, I’m seeing that … that’s just stupid.
yep… I am going to bite the bullet soon and get some though because I really want faster USB between my rack and office. I have been hoping for the last several years they would come down in price but I guess someone out there owns a patent and is being a dick with licensing.
looks like i’ll be better off with just standard extension cables and see if that works well enough
if your under 10 feet then yeah! since it sounds like you need 3.0 speeds.
It’s under 10ft as the crow flies 
I have a lot of cables I cannot use for VR as it is quite a thing to achieve USB 3 speeds while not exceeding the power limits on your mother board.
This is often not the problem of the cable, but rather your motherboard. For the cables and or devices compensate for voltage drop by drawing more power and triggering the limit on motherboard.
If it fails and you really need USB 3 speeds, then you can add a hub with power.
I ordered one of these to see if it works well enough, otherwise I’ll plug it into the powered hub I have as well and rearrange where things are plugged in. This damn B450 Tomahawk Max is short on USB ports and it’s bothersome.
I bought a PCIe USB 3.0 card that had 4 Type-A and 2 Type-C ports on it, but it was a bit flaky with my system for some reason. Don’t know if it was the board or the drivers, so I just yanked it and returned it to Amazon, didn’t feel like bothering with it.
For that kind of money, have you looked at USB over sfp+/fiber extenders/repeaters?
USB 3.0 (some with +2.0/1.1) USB Over Multi-mode Fiber – Transwan
USB 3.0/3.1gen1 (some with +2.0/1.1) https://www.freshdigit.com/fdt/product-category/usb3-fiber-extenders/
The usb 3.0 only ones tend to be $200-300. The ones backwards compatible with USB 2.0/1.0 tend to be well over $600
Protip: Extron’s extender USB 2.0/1.1 plus series works over your existing ethernet network, and doesn’t need its own line. You can generally get the transmitter/receiver for ~$75, which is about what I got mine for over a year ago. Zero issues this whole time. Don’t confuse the plus series with the original series which needs it’s own dedicated line.
So you could get a cheap 2.0/1.1 set for your mouse and keyboard, and a separate 3.0/3.1 set for your special needs devices. And even after buying some OM3/OM4 cable you’d come in well under $1000. You also don’t have to worry about trying to send power down a cable.
These are the only ones that I know of which are actually reliable enough to justify the price tag. If im spending $1000 to get USB 3 over fiber, I dont want to bother with unknown Chinese junk.
For that kind of money, I’m passing. It’s not that big of a deal, just a couple of webcams I use for videos. If I’m gonna toss out $1000, I’m getting a real camera and be done with it.
This thread got expensive REAL QUICK!
USB 3 is a PITA 
maybe in 5 more years we will have lower cost converters but for the time being… yeah.