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i am inevitable

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do you guys hear that i think half the world just died

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i mean not literally just on the inside

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you guys knew this day was coming this is the arkwus

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w73 from vivify

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an RGB HDMI cable

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for gaming it lights up in seven different colors and it's available on

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the vivify site for 80 bucks for the nine foot version or a hundred dollars

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for the 15 foot at least the last time i checked now for a premium HDMI cable for

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gamers i actually don't think that pricing is entirely unreasonable

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especially given that there is surprisingly little snake oil involved

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in their sales pitch for this thing because get this the vivify

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arques is actually a fiber optic cable which

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might be one of the primary drivers of the cost here

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so let's take a look at what exactly the

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crap all of this means thermal grizzlies

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conduct not liquid metal thermal interface material offers maximum

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cooling performance check it out and keep things cool at the link in the video description

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before we make it any further i want to see it in all of its different colors so

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apparently there's a touch sensitive button somewhere on it that if you press

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will change the colors ah here it is so on the logo on the display end if you

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touch it enough times you get this nice RGB

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color cycle thing going on now apparently if you hold it the RGB will

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actually turn off entirely cool ridiculous so one of the advantages of

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being fiber optic is of course that there's no copper inside the uh the

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sheathing here so it's like super light super light take that

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drabness now the weird thing is that vivify's

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marketing for this thing is shockingly straightforward and honest

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for an expensive fancy cable manufacturer mmorpg seems to have

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invented the claim that the overall visual quality will increase going from

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a regular HDMI cable to a 4k one that's not true it's a digital signal and it

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either works or it cuts out and i have

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no idea where vortez.net

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is getting their claims about superior color depth brightness and contrast

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compared to traditional copper HDMI cables because that is obvious bullcrap

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and vivify themselves have no reference

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to this whatsoever on their website in fact they are completely focused on the

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fact that they are certified for 18 gigabit per second operation which is

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totally valid and very important and also that fiber optic connections reduce

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susceptibility to electromagnetic interference and radio frequency

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interference that's true and they also claim that they increased

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the maximum range though they are not claiming that this range couldn't be

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handled by copper so let's take a look at how it works i'm

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actually going to have to unplug it for a second here that's neat it goes back to red okay so

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like other active cables this is a directional cable because the

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copper wires that come out of your gaming pc or your xbox or whatever have

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to be translated before they can be carried over a fiber optic cable by the

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way it's not like there's a latency penalty for this though this is a an

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industry standard in high speed telecommunications already what it means

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though is that there is circuitry that is built into each end of this cable

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that has to be powered and that can only work one way so that's why you've got to

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check carefully ah here we go the source end needs to go into your source

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and the display end needs to go into the back of your tv or your monitor

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otherwise it will not work because they don't have the same ics in them now one

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of the questions that probably jumps to mind when you hear about a cable that

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has integrated circuits in it is how on earth do you power that i mean HDMI is

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not a power connector and usually one of

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the characteristics of fiber optic cables is that they can't carry power we

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actually showed this in our optical usb cable video where we ran it over the

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garage roof of our old studio so that cable could carry usb data but the

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device at the other end needed to have its own power source so we ended up

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needing to run like this giant bulky extension cord that was plugged into a

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power outlet inside anyway so as it turns out HDMI can output a little bit

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of power but only about 50 milliamps at

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5 volts now some HDMI looking ports like

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they will actually look identical to this can do a lot more as much as 40

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watts but those are called mhl compatible ports and while mhl support

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is actually pretty solid in the wild out there it wouldn't be 100 compatible with

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all HDMI devices so vivify stuck with a

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supplementary connector so you can actually see this right here to boost

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light output so it's just a simple micro usb this is just a normal micro

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usb cable these wings are because it plugs into a logitech mouse

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and then we plug into a usb port i don't think that's doing anything maybe it has

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to be plugged in let's have a look all right so let's try pulling the supplementary power

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nope that is making no difference whatsoever you know i'm starting to

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think the supplementary power might just be for if your HDMI port

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has trouble like can't supply enough power like it was poorly designed in the first place

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because this really does not seem to be making a difference

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okay well the good news i guess then is that

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you're getting the full experience without the extra power cable as long as

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your HDMI port can deliver the right amount of power the bad news is

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that there is a significant amount of fading that goes on between the very

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start of the cable and the middle i mean this is the kind of thing that you sort

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of expect whenever you're firing light into a diffuser it's going to well

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diffuse and it's not going to be as strong as it gets toward the middle but

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the good news is they get around this design problem at least somewhat by actually having

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light firing down from both ends so it's only in the middle of the cable

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that it's weakest you can see that's a pretty stark difference oh so this is

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cool i actually didn't notice this before when you're plugged in to both sides but

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your device is powered off and it's not getting any signal it actually turns off

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so check that out now i could see that it took a moment

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to remember which mode it was supposed to be in

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that's really interesting too so now that our gaming RGB HDMI cable

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works all i guess that's left to do is for us to game on it according to the

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vivify website 4k 60 hertz 18 gigabit

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per second should be no problem whatsoever very nice oh when our tv even

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automatically detected that we can turn on ultra hd deep color so one of the

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best compromises for gaming on a tv these days is instead of running at the

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full 4k resolution running at 1440p but

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cranking the refresh rate to 120hz that way you get the benefit of well

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increased sharpness over 1080p anyway even if it's not quite 4k like this

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looks pretty darn good even though i'm sitting like two and a half feet away from it

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and you get the smoothness of 120 FPS on

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120 hertz that is as long as you've got the gaming horsepower to back it up to

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make sure we're doing our due diligence i plugged it into a pc and a monitor

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this time and the monitor lit up exactly as we'd expect so it seems to operate

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entirely seamlessly from that perspective and

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our cable is illuminated and it even remembered what setting we were on on

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the other display now it is still a little bit dimmer in the middle but if

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you're not in a really brightly lit room i actually don't see it being that much

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of a problem and it was while i was climbing around back behind the computer

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here and fighting with the two different cables that we had running between this

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because we had it set up before that it occurred to me that while this is

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an 80 to 100 solution on special i think

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it's like 150 for the long one when it's not on special

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there is a situation where it could be very practical to have like imagine this

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in a home theater where you've got your xbox your nintendo switch your

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cable box whatever else if you could just go to the back of your receiver

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and like press a button be like yeah where does

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this one go and it'll change colors

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that would actually be pretty sweet right

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yeah or you could just have it color-coded just put a little you know dot on your

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switch red and then you know that the other end of that red cable is

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definitely the switch as you're plugging things in i mean it's very first world

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solution for sure but you know how i was complaining that it only operates in

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breathing mode look it's solid color now

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oh that's way better what did i do oh that is way better i like that so

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much better now obviously this is a very

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overkill solution to being able to tell like you know

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which cables plugged into your multi-thousand dollar computer or

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whatever but it's still something that i could see coming

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in handy for people from time to time all right then brandon it works as

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expected it lights up about as much as i could possibly hope given the very

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limited power source is there anything really left to do

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do you want to take it apart

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there we go there is far more going on here than i

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initially anticipated so right here

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seems to be where our led is mounted and then this

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right here is the the plastic carrier

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for our diffusion strip which is along the

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side of the HDMI cable there now this here

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looks like our fiber optics but then what i can't figure out

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is what all these guys are over on the other side all these ones

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that ended up getting disconnected

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so receiver 5 volt

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ground transmitter 5 volt

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i wonder if this is just to do with the RGB control

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actually that would make sense come on

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so if we look really closely you can see there's actually three layers to the RGB

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component so there's the inner part which is almost completely clear so

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that's carrying the light down the cable

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then there's an outer sheath here that doesn't seem to be quite as clear so

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maybe that's to help with diffusion and then the outer sheath of the entire

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thing so that covers our fibers that covers

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any of these signal wires all that good stuff that is black around most of it

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and then is actually clear here as well so overall then my impressions here are

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really positive the product does exactly what it said it was going to do there's

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no snake oil or bs marketing going on with it and while it is expensive for an

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HDMI cable i can understand why it's expensive it's because it's a fiber

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optic cable not to mention that there was actual engineering that went into

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getting it to do the things that it does now whether it's worth it to you to have

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an RGB HDMI cable that's uh definitely

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an opportunity for a different debate but what i will say is that for me

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personally honestly the super

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long cable is something that works against it

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although i think i understand why vivify only made it available in nine and

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fifteen foot sections i think it's because if they did a six foot or a

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three foot people would be surprised to see that the price would be almost the

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same because most of the cost is going to actually be in these connectors and

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chips and not in just running a longer piece of fiber optics

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so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you like fiber optics and data over

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long distances maybe check out the recent video we did where i used a

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single pc in my attic to run all of the

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computers in my house using long distance fiber optic displayport and usb

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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

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enjoyed this video i'm not i'm like really sad that i've ruined it now but

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i'm also really happy that i know how it works so