 It's punishment time! This enormous pile of 2B-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 good stuff. They create PCs for gamers who want to win and who want high frame rates without breaking the bank. They're backed by a 2-year parts and labor warranty, so you're covered and you can click the link in the video description to start creating your PC today. 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 you? 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 LevelOneTex, 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-revisons 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 It was superseded by 1.4 almost immediately, which carries the same bandwidth, but added support for DisplayStream Compression 1.2, forward error correction, and HDR10 metadata.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 DisplayStream 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 on the end screen if you're playing catch-up. Now here are our tests. We have three groupings. Tab 1 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 in 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. 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. I'm going to have to use 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 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 8.1 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. 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 8 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 per lane 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 UHBR 10 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 getcha 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 monitors. I knew it. 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 am going to enjoy cutting that cable up. Oh my God, that nearly hit the lens. We also had one of Samsung's bundled cables fail out right here. That really 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 Samsung for sponsoring today's video. Samsung has something new for you, the Freestyle. It's a point and play projector with a compact design and adjustable 180 degree cradle stand. You don't need to worry about fiddling with a focus wheel or rearranging your projector because the auto sensing feature will intuitively correct skewed and blurry images for you. If you're on the go, the Freestyle has a 360 degree speaker and a five watt woofer for powerful, all around sound, and you can power it with an external battery so it works no matter where you are. It uses Samsung's built-in smart TV experience that features Samsung TV Plus, various streaming platforms and more while also allowing you to use Bixby or Amazon ALE XA so that you can go hands free. It offers full HD resolution and the ability to project an image between 30 and a hundred inches allowing you to use it in a small space or you can go all out and create an at home theater experience. So take your theater with you wherever you go with the Freestyle. You can learn more about Samsung's the Freestyle and get a free carrying case if you pre-order before February 10th using the link down 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.