foreign
this enormous pile of to be tested
DisplayPort cables comes from all the most popular brands Amazon Basics
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
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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 a hundred runs in total and ended up with
this masterpiece of a spreadsheet
proud of this one aren't you married 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 one 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and it's the same story for DisplayPort 1.3 it was superseded by 1.4 almost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 display ports 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 going to gloss over a little
bit today like how digital signaling Works we're going to 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 2 and orange are
single samples of nine of the top 10 cables on Amazon and finally Tab 3 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
every single one passed 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
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.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 ShortCircuit 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
Amazon Basics 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 DisplayPort 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 8.1gb 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 to get around this some applications of
DisplayPort have implemented more than the usual four lanes Apple famously
created a custom 8-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 long-term solution however is
DisplayPort 2.0 which can run in three new modes named according to their
perlane bitrate 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 every single one passed 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 uh-br 10 spec
Wild now they're not an amazing deal cost
wise but um 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 you 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
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 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 my people up oh my God that nearly hit the lens 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 want to get the most out of Intel's upcoming
Arc Alchemist gpus which are confirmed to have DisplayPort 2.0 thanks to
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below if you guys enjoyed this video go check out the HDMI cable testing video
where we 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