A follow up: Belkin reached out to explain the results we saw with their cable: "Our coax design is that pins 2 5 8 11 and 17 are connected to a common ground shield to create a shield loop - so it would fail a continuity test - but it doesn’t mean that the cable fails. The reason Belkin chose this design is because it creates a shield loop to protect it from interference."

The Included cables with 'Anything' are of key importance. We all get them. Add a segment to any product review about the Included cables.

i spent around $330 USD on my 65 foot active optical HDMI 2.1 cable, to reach the projector i have. does not work

Some purchase recommendations at the end would have been nice!

Sweet! Can we do the same thing now.... with DisplayPort? 😅

This is the kind of content that basically only LLT can do and is amazing to see your team doing

These kinda scientific videos on consumer tech are far and few beyond, and should just get more regular with your new lab. So I am really excited you guys are doing this

People in the world of tech would rarely go through this kind of hellish process. Kudos to the team who did this painstaking work. Their work has provided knowledge to around ~2.5M people!!

I've been waiting for so long for this, I can't wait for the usb-c one

I’m actually curious to see if Display Port cables follow similar trends to the HDMI cables. If you have the capability, it might be worth tossing a few in the next batch for science!

I'd love it if you could test the pack-in HDMI cables included with the current crop of game systems. Should we be chucking them on Christmas morning, or are they sufficient to get the most from the future of gaming?

... "One failure is a fluke, two is a coincidence, three is a pattern." LOVE IT -- this is wisdom that transcends HDMI cables and tech

For computers, HDMI has been my second choice. I prefer to use a DisplayPort cable. In the past, the specs for DP cables have generally exceeded those of HDMI. So I'd like to see a similar check or DP cables.

Please do this for USB-C cables too! There was a Google engineer years ago that used to test them and post which ones actually were in spec but as far as I know he hasn't been doing it for quite a while now.

so which cables did pass? That spreadsheet is it available somewhere? Where is the good old screenshot of what cables failed and which passed?

It would be great to see tests like this for other types of cables and an explainer on what the standards mean and how failures impact day to day usage would also be great!

I'd love to see the HDMI cables that come with consoles, especially PS5 and XSX, tested. As far as cheap brands go, I mostly buy from Cable Matters these days as I have had pretty good luck with them working as advertised and not immediately breaking, but I'd love to see more objective data. I think another good follow up to this video would be durability testing. I don't really know exactly how you'd go about it, but figuring out not just how the cables perform out of the box but how they perform in a few weeks/months would also be good to know.

I'd love to see a roundup like this video done on DisplayPort cables since they seem to be a lot more troublesome if you don't ensure they're Vesa Certified

I would LOVE to see more content like this! It absolutely helps me make an informed decision! Like, which HDMI AOC fiber cable should I buy?

I'd love to see you take a deep dive on adapters. Take a cable you know works very well and try connecting it to different adapters to see how they perform.

So Linus is the guy who has all my HDMI cables when I need them !

Now that HDMI has caught up with DisplayPort I wonder which of the two is most reliable in general when you have a choice of which to use for your monitor

With HDMI 2.1, 4K 120hz, 12 bit HDR, e-ARC, Atmos, etc. Cable quality is more essential than its ever been. I’ve had major issues with HDMI 2.1 cables on my 3090 and LG OLED

PROF Riley more please!!! guy has a knack for the explaining in a fun way. Not just the script, the voice inflections and body language. love it!

Dude! This is some of your best content! PLEASE keep doing this investigative work as much as feasible! Loved the scientific break-down of signal quality, jitter, etc. Makes the whole science of signals across the wire so approachable and understandable. I feel like an informed consumer again and your production quality is top-notch as usual! Thanks Linus and team!

I wish you has included Cable Matters in the testing. They talk about how their HDMI 2.1 cables meet the specs and can hit the 48 Gbps requirements. It would be nice to know if that is true since I replaced everything in my setup with their cables last year.

Enjoyed this a lot; the obscure content is why I love this channel GJ on testing Colin.

Linus you are a national treasure. Nobody does testing anymore, except you and Farm Project.

Hi, ex-professional network cable installer/designer here. Relevance: we tested all runs, existing and new, with a calibrated cable certifier before any project could be called completed. (Trust me, that is a *lot* of cable testing!) A few comments: 1) That used-in-office ROG cable that "failed" may have actually been good when it shipped. You mentioned that it only failed continuity, and the video showed the continuity only failed on the shell -- the shell is by far the most common point of failure for a cable after repeated use, as it commonly takes the brunt of the beating from even typical bending of the cable where the housing ends. A few severe angles there under stress from some accidental yanks can do a number on them over time. (That said, get rid of it anyway: the shell ties to chassis ground, and a floating ground of any type can be hell on signal integrity. It served its time honorably; it's time to retire it. But props on ROG for sourcing a good quality cable.) 2) Seeing the same pairs fail across a number of different cables is actually remarkably common. Particularly with high signaling speeds, crosstalk across wire pairs can be a serious limitation on the performance of the overall cable, and the internal layout of the pairs relative to each other within the cable are very commonly the same not just across different cables or batches, but even across multiple manufacturers. There is more detail wrt why that is, but I doubt anyone's *that* interested. :) (This is, incidentally, true even when one takes into account different OEMs -- a consideration that I wish the video had at least mentioned, considering neither Amazon nor Monoprice manufacture their own cables. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Belkin doesn't for the majority of their cables either...) 3) For HDMI 2.1 in particular, you're right that long cables are much less likely to pass, but for that info to be useful to "the average consumer", you should probably note what that *actually* means. A lot of the HDMI 2.1 spec doesn't require bandwidth greater than the 1.4/2.0-era Cat 2 spec. Specifically, if you're running up to 4K 60Hz without HDR or 4K 30Hz with HDR (or 1080p with pretty much any fancy feature you want), an HDMI 2.0 ("Premium") rated Cat 2 cable is well within spec for those HDMI 2.1 applications -- which also means it's much easier to find longer runs that are spec-compliant, assuming no interference issues with the run of course. If you do need Cat 3 spec'd cables, just don't even plan on long runs without active components or the like, honestly. AFAIK there hasn't even been a single HDMI cable by any manufacturer certified to run past 15-16ft, and I'm pretty doubtful that we'll ever see a certified passive 25ft Cat 3 any time in the near future if at all (bad spec design on HDMI's part -- another long story the details of which I'm not throwing in here; this is long enough already). And if you're doing any long runs *at all*, you will want to stick with the officially certified Premium or Ultra High Speed products, with the HDMI.org sticker on them. (And verify their cert, of course!)

Please tell me the $1000 cable made comeback. (Gonna watch the video now.)

Question: Did you test any cables that failed that were labeled right out of the box as ULTRA PREMIUM Certified? If so, which ones to avoid?

What a great video. LTT quality just gets better and better. It's like a high-budget production TV show. Awesome

I would like seeing more tests of 'included monitor' cables. Not just from RoG, but also Gigabyte, MSI, and BenQ (esp BenQ since they advertise including high-quality cables here in Europe).

Riley’s over dramatic acting is probably one of the best investments LTT has ever made. GG Riley

Smart on the multiple cable purchases for fair testing. I have done large scale deployments with just ethernet cabling. The worst install was a 10% failure rate (from a known good Manufacturer). Their China-based supplier decided to change their ways and incorporated small groups of those 'new spec' cables in our 10k+ quantity order. Sadly these cables were for wireless APs so required ladder work to resolve.

This was very educational and I never knew the inportance of cable integrity. Thanks LTT!

Linus: buys a cable tester The entire cable industry: I'm in danger! * chuckles *

I don't even need new HDMI cables but I feel like buying new HDMI cables...

This is really fascinating and I would love to see more cables tested.

Everybody, remember, Linus didn't spend $1000 on cable testing. He spent $1000 on hardware and then probably $2500+ in person-hours doing the testing and editing and in such. 😂

*looks down at my 8 year old HDMI cable* Have you been betraying me all this time?

I was really hoping to see monster cables in this roundup. In my world they are the original overprices cable provider. They make incredible claims about their superior shielding and performance. While only costing roughly 4 times more than what other cables charge. It would be nice to see if they even meet the requirements.

Wonderful. I like these types of videos , which I can learn from so I can be a better informed consumer and some on that likes to know as much as possible of the tech I use.

Regarding the massive Monoprice failures, I have a question. Monoprice's web site advertises some cables as "certified", while others don't use this term in their description. Was there any correlation between certification and whether the cable passed the test? Or did their "certified" 48G cables fail just as much as the ones that don't mention certification?

I was seriously expecting Linus to test that THOUSAND dollar HDMI cable that he bought several years ago. He literally said that he wanted to use an oscilloscope to see the tiny gain in conductivity of something like that. THE CABLE CAME IN A CARRYING CASE WITH AN AUTHENTICITY CERTIFICATE!!!

I feel like any and every IT section at a company should have one of these cable testers. Literal thousands of hours of troubleshooting fixed right there. Thanks for another great video with this thing! Looking forward to seeing it appear in the future!

The eye diagram discussion could have covered amplitude noise as well as just phase (jitter). But very good to see an explanation on it in your channel! Keep the good work

Cool that you went into effort of looking into an eye diagram, pretty solid review!

I bet so many dodgey companies that make hdmi cables are pissed as hell at you right now. Thanks for the information Linus, another video to add to my education playlist *grievous cough*

You can build a scary HDMI monster now

These fail rates are WAY higher than I thought they would be. This explains so much. Nicely done.

This was awesome. Thank you!

I would love to see this for Displayport cables, people always say "DP cable quality actually matters unlike hdmi"

Riley: "All late assignments get ZERO" Me: Professor PLEASE!

This is kinda video that has real world help for viewers means alot to people like me. These company's are marketing old cables as 2.1 seems like and not puting in bigger wires in longer run cables

I really like the cinematics of this video. We can see that it was put a lot of work in it. I really like the b rolls. And all the characters in it

I’d really like to see USB-C, Thunderbolt 3/4, DisplayPort and especially Ethernet cables being tested. Oh and of course all the snake oil cables that try to 1up them. What I’m really interested in are cables from Anker, KabelDirekt* and Oehlbach* (* might be EU-only?).

Employee: “I can’t come into work on time “ Employer: “ why not?” Employee: “ I’ve got the jitters”

Loved the vid! Thanks guys!

Having recently experienced issues with display port cables it would be really cool to see these tests for DP.

One thing I really appreciate about LTT videos is that despite being made to be as wide-reaching as possible to get as many people watching, the videos themselves still dive quite deeply into a lot of the granular stuff and are well-researched for how quickly they have to be produced!

I want to see Denis buy some cables that he thinks are "cool" maybe he will find ones with feet warmers. I like these types of snake oil busters as manufacturers may step up their game before they get called out by big tech viewers now. Also I love more professor riley!

Oh man these are the details I needed!

Please do more of these types of videos!!!

I love when my favorite TechTubers get new toys to play with that can aid in holding manufacturers accountable for the performance of their products. Linus seems to be about as enamored with his cable tester as Steve at Gamer's Nexus is with his industrial fan tester. Good stuff.

Wow, and here I was so sure Monoprice would come out better. Wellp

I barely even care about cables but as a lifelong reader of Consumer Reports, you give me efforts to rate the actual quality of things without overt bias and I am there every time. Hell yeah

Great tests(!!) I’d really like to see how various skinny and flat cables perform. Lots more likely to have problems, I’d think…

Everyone is suggesting high-end brands for analog cable tests and this probably goes without saying, but please continue to include Amazon Basics and Monoprice in your lineup.

I'd love a video specifically on the whole mess that is USB-C / USB generations / Thunderbolt - both in terms of explaining the differences properly, but also testing various cables. And of course testing some crazy snakeoil audiophile cables sounds like a lot of fun. I'm thinking audioquest and then something like Hart audio which seems to be the go-to for fairly prices custom made cables.

Thank you for this high quality content! Amazing how many times you make a video and my first thought is: "FINALLY!! Someone is doing this!!!"

It actually would be really useful to test fiber hdmi 2.1 cables. They’re super expensive and don’t have a lot of reviews

With USB-C/Thunderbolt being the new thing, I would love to see how good all these USB-C/Thunderbolt cables really are. As I have gotten a few that have not done as they've claimed.

I really wanna know if the “HDMI 2.1” cables they include with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles are within spec.

Thank you once again for these useful info that you can't find nowhere else, and everybody wants to know when shopping. ♥

This was awesome, thanks for the deep dive and please dive deaper!

I would love to see more on "included" cables. Knowing whether or not I should buy a separate cable with a monitor could be the deciding factor on a monitor when they're already super competitive with each other on pricing. Especially going into black friday

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It would be great to see a similar video for USB-C cables, different ratings for charging speeds, data transfer etc

Yes! Please, go for audiophile cables! I would suggest AudioQuest (basic Blueberry vs top Dragon lines), Inakustik and Van Den Hul

8:42 During engineering work, I prefer something that consistently fails... makes it much easier to diagnose and address.... though, preferably not in production 0_0

As an audiophile, sound designer and Dj i would love to see how audio cables compete as i only use my ears and don't hear any difference at all or it starts popping and crackling immediately and know not to use that one. I mainly use Devine cables, they are inexpensive compared to most other brands and the build quality is fairly decent. Would like to see a stand off between Cordial and Roland per example or, Pro-cab, Stagg, Audioquest, Devine, Klotz, Neutrik just to name a few! Keep up the good work :D

Awesome video. Thanks. It helps a lot. I'd love to see an audiophile version. But I'd also love to know how to test my own cables.

Jitter doesn't cause "pops" or "crackles" in analog audio. It's just noise floor.

Huge kudos for making this, buying cables has always just been a case of *shrug*, they seem reputable and having no idea what things to look out for. Thank you for using your buying power to shine a light on things to look out for here.

I'm curious about DisplayPort cables. Recently, I've had my two of my 3 monitors just blank out on me, or won't turn on. I suspect this may be an issue of these monitors being freesync and my GPU being nVidia. But I'd also like to rule out cheap/barely functioning DisplayPort cables.

Awesome 20 minute video with a ton of really good information but I’m really left kind of confused at the end of it all. I really don’t even know what cable to buy after all that. Why didn’t you create a list of brands and length cords in order of best to worst? I’m looking for a 10 ft cable at the moment and you mentioned having a higher percentage of 10 ft failing but didn’t get into specifics as far as which 10 ft was most consistent?

Hey thanks for this, it's very appreciated!! Am very curious to see similar testing done on display port cables ;)

I feel like it's a given that you should test the Audioquest HDMI Cables, however id be interested to see the cables that come with more everyday electronics like the Series X/S/One, PS5/PS4, and maybe even Cables that come with Monitors, especially the more expensive ones that support HDMI 2.1. I feel like it would make a great follow up video to this!

Linus, what about testing jitter-prone cables with a ferrite core choke? You can buy snap-on chokes. It would be interesting to see if you can take a crap cable and get better performance out of it.

Oh man I love those signal integrity graphs

Thank you for this video, really cleared up some stuff for me. Now I just have to make sure that I buy the right brand of 30ft HDMI cable.

Linus you guys SHOULD start selling cables on your store and also have them cable tested to meet spec I would gladly buy if it is a good cable

Professor Riley is lit 🔥

Thank you for this. This was amazing

Thanks for doing this! Great video.

I’d like to see AudioQuest cables testes, we uses them at work and it would be good to know if it’s worth it. Especially at longer lengths.

This is my favorite kind of content from you, Linus. Deep dive on a product I use, pragmatic and data driven comparisons, helped me save money and skip bullshit, entertaining but not cringe. More beast mode pragmatic deep dives, please! THIS is your best product.

beside the latest stuff that happens to your company, content is good and info for generally informative. thumbs up

id really like to see a video like this be done with micro usb cables too :O, there's a lot of options out there and i feel like its really hard to come across a definitive good micro usb brand