(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.
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(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it was superseded by 1.4 almost immediately,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 gonna gloss over a little bit today,
like how digital signaling works.
We're gonna 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 wanna get the most
out of Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist GPU's,
which are confirmed to have DisplayPort 2.0.
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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.