i am inevitable
do you guys hear that i think half the world just died
i mean not literally just on the inside
you guys knew this day was coming this is the arkwus
w73 from vivify
an RGB HDMI cable
for gaming it lights up in seven different colors and it's available on
the vivify site for 80 bucks for the nine foot version or a hundred dollars
for the 15 foot at least the last time i checked now for a premium HDMI cable for
gamers i actually don't think that pricing is entirely unreasonable
especially given that there is surprisingly little snake oil involved
in their sales pitch for this thing because get this the vivify
arques is actually a fiber optic cable which
might be one of the primary drivers of the cost here
so let's take a look at what exactly the
crap all of this means thermal grizzlies
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cooling performance check it out and keep things cool at the link in the video description
before we make it any further i want to see it in all of its different colors so
apparently there's a touch sensitive button somewhere on it that if you press
will change the colors ah here it is so on the logo on the display end if you
touch it enough times you get this nice RGB
color cycle thing going on now apparently if you hold it the RGB will
actually turn off entirely cool ridiculous so one of the advantages of
being fiber optic is of course that there's no copper inside the uh the
sheathing here so it's like super light super light take that
drabness now the weird thing is that vivify's
marketing for this thing is shockingly straightforward and honest
for an expensive fancy cable manufacturer mmorpg seems to have
invented the claim that the overall visual quality will increase going from
a regular HDMI cable to a 4k one that's not true it's a digital signal and it
either works or it cuts out and i have
no idea where vortez.net
is getting their claims about superior color depth brightness and contrast
compared to traditional copper HDMI cables because that is obvious bullcrap
and vivify themselves have no reference
to this whatsoever on their website in fact they are completely focused on the
fact that they are certified for 18 gigabit per second operation which is
totally valid and very important and also that fiber optic connections reduce
susceptibility to electromagnetic interference and radio frequency
interference that's true and they also claim that they increased
the maximum range though they are not claiming that this range couldn't be
handled by copper so let's take a look at how it works i'm
actually going to have to unplug it for a second here that's neat it goes back to red okay so
like other active cables this is a directional cable because the
copper wires that come out of your gaming pc or your xbox or whatever have
to be translated before they can be carried over a fiber optic cable by the
way it's not like there's a latency penalty for this though this is a an
industry standard in high speed telecommunications already what it means
though is that there is circuitry that is built into each end of this cable
that has to be powered and that can only work one way so that's why you've got to
check carefully ah here we go the source end needs to go into your source
and the display end needs to go into the back of your tv or your monitor
otherwise it will not work because they don't have the same ics in them now one
of the questions that probably jumps to mind when you hear about a cable that
has integrated circuits in it is how on earth do you power that i mean HDMI is
not a power connector and usually one of
the characteristics of fiber optic cables is that they can't carry power we
actually showed this in our optical usb cable video where we ran it over the
garage roof of our old studio so that cable could carry usb data but the
device at the other end needed to have its own power source so we ended up
needing to run like this giant bulky extension cord that was plugged into a
power outlet inside anyway so as it turns out HDMI can output a little bit
of power but only about 50 milliamps at
5 volts now some HDMI looking ports like
they will actually look identical to this can do a lot more as much as 40
watts but those are called mhl compatible ports and while mhl support
is actually pretty solid in the wild out there it wouldn't be 100 compatible with
all HDMI devices so vivify stuck with a
supplementary connector so you can actually see this right here to boost
light output so it's just a simple micro usb this is just a normal micro
usb cable these wings are because it plugs into a logitech mouse
and then we plug into a usb port i don't think that's doing anything maybe it has
to be plugged in let's have a look all right so let's try pulling the supplementary power
nope that is making no difference whatsoever you know i'm starting to
think the supplementary power might just be for if your HDMI port
has trouble like can't supply enough power like it was poorly designed in the first place
because this really does not seem to be making a difference
okay well the good news i guess then is that
you're getting the full experience without the extra power cable as long as
your HDMI port can deliver the right amount of power the bad news is
that there is a significant amount of fading that goes on between the very
start of the cable and the middle i mean this is the kind of thing that you sort
of expect whenever you're firing light into a diffuser it's going to well
diffuse and it's not going to be as strong as it gets toward the middle but
the good news is they get around this design problem at least somewhat by actually having
light firing down from both ends so it's only in the middle of the cable
that it's weakest you can see that's a pretty stark difference oh so this is
cool i actually didn't notice this before when you're plugged in to both sides but
your device is powered off and it's not getting any signal it actually turns off
so check that out now i could see that it took a moment
to remember which mode it was supposed to be in
that's really interesting too so now that our gaming RGB HDMI cable
works all i guess that's left to do is for us to game on it according to the
vivify website 4k 60 hertz 18 gigabit
per second should be no problem whatsoever very nice oh when our tv even
automatically detected that we can turn on ultra hd deep color so one of the
best compromises for gaming on a tv these days is instead of running at the
full 4k resolution running at 1440p but
cranking the refresh rate to 120hz that way you get the benefit of well
increased sharpness over 1080p anyway even if it's not quite 4k like this
looks pretty darn good even though i'm sitting like two and a half feet away from it
and you get the smoothness of 120 FPS on
120 hertz that is as long as you've got the gaming horsepower to back it up to
make sure we're doing our due diligence i plugged it into a pc and a monitor
this time and the monitor lit up exactly as we'd expect so it seems to operate
entirely seamlessly from that perspective and
our cable is illuminated and it even remembered what setting we were on on
the other display now it is still a little bit dimmer in the middle but if
you're not in a really brightly lit room i actually don't see it being that much
of a problem and it was while i was climbing around back behind the computer
here and fighting with the two different cables that we had running between this
because we had it set up before that it occurred to me that while this is
an 80 to 100 solution on special i think
it's like 150 for the long one when it's not on special
there is a situation where it could be very practical to have like imagine this
in a home theater where you've got your xbox your nintendo switch your
cable box whatever else if you could just go to the back of your receiver
and like press a button be like yeah where does
this one go and it'll change colors
that would actually be pretty sweet right
yeah or you could just have it color-coded just put a little you know dot on your
switch red and then you know that the other end of that red cable is
definitely the switch as you're plugging things in i mean it's very first world
solution for sure but you know how i was complaining that it only operates in
breathing mode look it's solid color now
oh that's way better what did i do oh that is way better i like that so
much better now obviously this is a very
overkill solution to being able to tell like you know
which cables plugged into your multi-thousand dollar computer or
whatever but it's still something that i could see coming
in handy for people from time to time all right then brandon it works as
expected it lights up about as much as i could possibly hope given the very
limited power source is there anything really left to do
do you want to take it apart
there we go there is far more going on here than i
initially anticipated so right here
seems to be where our led is mounted and then this
right here is the the plastic carrier
for our diffusion strip which is along the
side of the HDMI cable there now this here
looks like our fiber optics but then what i can't figure out
is what all these guys are over on the other side all these ones
that ended up getting disconnected
so receiver 5 volt
ground transmitter 5 volt
i wonder if this is just to do with the RGB control
actually that would make sense come on
so if we look really closely you can see there's actually three layers to the RGB
component so there's the inner part which is almost completely clear so
that's carrying the light down the cable
then there's an outer sheath here that doesn't seem to be quite as clear so
maybe that's to help with diffusion and then the outer sheath of the entire
thing so that covers our fibers that covers
any of these signal wires all that good stuff that is black around most of it
and then is actually clear here as well so overall then my impressions here are
really positive the product does exactly what it said it was going to do there's
no snake oil or bs marketing going on with it and while it is expensive for an
HDMI cable i can understand why it's expensive it's because it's a fiber
optic cable not to mention that there was actual engineering that went into
getting it to do the things that it does now whether it's worth it to you to have
an RGB HDMI cable that's uh definitely
an opportunity for a different debate but what i will say is that for me
personally honestly the super
long cable is something that works against it
although i think i understand why vivify only made it available in nine and
fifteen foot sections i think it's because if they did a six foot or a
three foot people would be surprised to see that the price would be almost the
same because most of the cost is going to actually be in these connectors and
chips and not in just running a longer piece of fiber optics
so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you like fiber optics and data over
long distances maybe check out the recent video we did where i used a
single pc in my attic to run all of the
computers in my house using long distance fiber optic displayport and usb
cables if you haven't had enough of this video though stick around for this message
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tips in the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys hope you
enjoyed this video i'm not i'm like really sad that i've ruined it now but
i'm also really happy that i know how it works so