Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I Spent $1100 on DisplayPort Cables… for Science!”.
( whip cracking ), (, intense music ), It’s punishment, time., This enormous pile of to-be-tested, DisplayPort cables comes from all the most popular brands. AmazonBasics Monoprice, Best Buy and more.. We bought three of each at various lengths for the most popular models to give us multiple data points and we are going to be painstakingly running all of them through our Total Phase, Cable Tester to see who has the good stuff and who has the crude stuff.. I know our sponsor Build. Redux has the good stuff. They create PCs for gamers who wan na win and who want high frame rates without breaking the bank. They’re, backed by a two year, parts and labor warranty so you’re covered, and you can click the link in the video description to start. Creating your PC, today., (, upbeat, music, ), Okay, I lied a bit., The cables have already been tested at their rated speed and if they passed, we pushed them even further to see who is under promising and over delivering.. We did over 100 runs in total and ended up with this masterpiece of a spreadsheet.
Proud of this one aren’t ya: [ Colin ], Oh yeah. Nerd.! Now, why are we testing DisplayPort, Partly because we already tested HDMI and got a lot of requests to follow up with DisplayPort, but the other half is that people like me and Wendell over at Level 1 Techs who apparently actually went out and bought one of these Cable testers after our last video have had a lot of issues with DisplayPort over the years from intermittent signaling issues to outright dead cables., And I think it’s about time I figure out why.. Each cable went through our Total Phase, Cable Tester at the spec that it’s rated for.. Now there are a total of eight versions of DisplayPort, two of which are minor, a revisions that don’t change much., So we’ll acknowledge that they exist and move along, and even some of the numbered ones we didn’t have to do. Much. With.
DisplayPort versions, 1.0 and 1.1 are relatively ancient, so that’s part of why we’re not testing any of those cables here., But the real reason is that they weren’t widely adopted. So most cables are rated for at least DisplayPort 1.2 and it’s the same story for DisplayPort 1.3. It was superseded by 1.4, almost immediately, which carries the same bandwidth, but added support for display stream, compression 1.2 forward error, correction and HDR 10 metadata.. That leaves us with really three DisplayPorts that matter 1.2 1.4 and the upcoming 2.0 spec.
In consumer terms. The biggest difference between these three is that each one is rated for a different maximum bandwidth, the higher the number the faster it can go.. Now there are multiple ways to hit that limit. You could crank the resolution. You could crank the refresh rate. You could crank the color depth or realistically some combination of those three and then you just won’t be able to go any higher unless you enable display stream compression. We could talk a little bit more about that later.
Now here are the manufacturers we’re talking about today. You’ll, be familiar with many of these from our HDMI cable testing, video, where we covered some things in more depth that we’re gon na gloss over a little bit Today, like how digital signaling works., We’re gon na have a card in the end screen if you’re playing catch-up. Now here are our tests. We have three groupings. Tab.
One in yellow are the cables that we’re testing in triplicate to eliminate flukes. These are the most popular ones, we’re expecting most of you to actually buy. Tab.
Two in orange are single samples of 9 of the top 10 cables on Amazon. And finally, tab. Three in blue are cables that we sampled from around the office, including bundled cables from monitors made by Aorus, Samsung and ASUS ROG..
All right, Colin show us what’s behind tab number one. ( drums rolling, ), [, Colin ]; Okay, they all passed. Every single one, passed. [ Colin ], Every one., Every huh.! That’S not what I was expecting., So every single brand new cable that we purchased specifically for this video passed at its rated spec, which I didn’t see coming, but the science behind it kind of makes sense.
Here’s the thing. The inside of a DisplayPort cable is actually very similar to the inside of an HDMI cable, with only one more conductor for a total of 20 versus 19.. Both of them have four-shielded twisted pairs of conductors.. You could think of them kind of like the sides of this lanyard, but in HDMI only three of them carry data with a fourth kind of skinnier, one that just is reserved for clock.
Pulses. DisplayPort takes advantage here by using all four shielded pairs to transmit data.. You know what this isn’t working: let’s just do a different visual new colors of lanyards on lttstore.com.. This allows each pair to run at a lower frequency while maintaining overall transmission parity with HDMI., So with 12 of the 20 conductors used for the signal plus signal, minus and ground connections that leaves eight other conductors that are used to run a configuration channel. An auxiliary channel and a power connection., The power connection actually goes unused in common cables, though, and is reserved for use in devices with integrated DisplayPort cables and having these wires connected can actually cause a short circuit condition. That was a problem in the past, particularly with cheap mini DisplayPort, cables. Fun fact, by the way, those locking tabs on the end are not actually part of the official DisplayPort specification.
They are nice to have though.. Now, with respect to our results, we can gather that this reduction in signaling frequency is contributing to better signal integrity, leading to DisplayPort cables being more consistent than what we saw with HDMI.. So, if you’re buying a brand new cable today, cheap is probably cheerful and Infinite Cables once again topped our list for the lowest cost per foot, followed by AmazonBasics and Monoprice, but we’re not done yet.
Inside the dense document. That is the DisplayPort standard. There exists a set of definitions for transmission modes. These are the bit rates that DisplayPorts can transmit data at.
We’re not talking about resolutions per se, but rather the speed at which the cable operates. Full stop., DisplayPort 1.4, for example, is compatible with four different transmission modes. Rbr HBR, HBR2 and HBR3, which peaks at 8.1 gigabits per second per lane.. That means with four lanes: DisplayPort 1.4’s peak bandwidth is 32.4 gigabits per second.. That is significantly less than the 48 gigabit per second maximum of HDMI 2.1.. I am not calling it that ( chuckles ) To get around this some applications of DisplayPort have implemented more than the usual four lanes. Apple, famously created a custom eight-lane DisplayPort 1.2 interface to drive the first 5K iMac and Thunderbolt can also have up to eight lanes. Allowing it to carry two display signals over a single cable..
The longterm solution, however, is DisplayPort 2.0, which can run in three new modes named according to their per lane bit rate.. Now we’ll talk about why that matters shortly, but first, let’s take a look at our next tab: Amazon’s best sellers. How’d.
They do [ Colin ], All passed., Every single one passed again: [ Colin ] Again.. Now that’s crazy.! Every single one of them not only met the current spec that they were rated for, but even met the next gen UHBR10 spec wild.. Now they’re, not an amazing deal cost-wise, but at least they’re easy to order. I guess, and they helped us confirm an interesting pattern, or so we thought. One of the insidious ways that a bad DisplayPort cable can get ya is by working, but not working at the correct link. Speed., That’s actually a feature, not a bug.. Displayport is fully backwards.
Compatible so every time you plug in the devices go through a sort of handshake process called link training which determines the speed that they can operate at without errors, and even if the devices are both capable of a greater speed, let’s say DisplayPort 1.4, a bad cable. Could drag them back to a slower link, speed, let’s say DisplayPort 1.2, and this can be really hard to diagnose, because the links can be renegotiated on the fly, meaning that they might work fine for a bit then drop down only to jump back into action. Again. And we ran into just such a cable in tab number three, where we grabbed some longer DisplayPort cables that we’ve purchased over the years as well as a handful of cables that were included with the monitors..
I knew it ( laughs, ). I knew it.. I’Ve had so many issues with those 25-foot Monoprice cables that we bought in bulk like ages ago, but on this one one of the four pairs managed a continuity check, so it is connected but failed on signal, which is the worst kind of fail. I’m going to Enjoy cutting this cable, up.
[ Brandon ], Oh my God that nearly hit the lens. Oh, did it really [ Brandon ] Yeah.. We also had one of Samsung’s. Bundled cables fail out right here. Continuity means that the conductors are just not conducting.. Now we didn’t have enough of those kicking around that we could just positively identify as Samsung bundled cables, so we couldn’t draw a clear conclusion. Other than that. The one included with your monitor might not be the best quality, but pretty much any reputable brand cable off the shelf should be okay, even if you’re, a forward-thinking consumer who might wan na get the most out of Intel’s upcoming Arc. Alchemist GPU’s, which are confirmed to have DisplayPort 2.0. Thanks to Samsung for sponsoring today’s video. Samsung, has something new for you, The freestyle.
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If you guys enjoyed this video go check out the HDMI cable testing, video, where we’ve got into a little bit more depth about what some of the charts that you guys might be looking at here mean and yeah see like the eye diagrams and stuff, and why A narrow eye is a bad eye. .