 I am inevitable. Did 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 Arquus 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 Arquus 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 conduct a not liquid metal thermal interface material offers maximum cooling performance. Check it out and keep things cool at the link in the video description. I want to see it in all of the other videos and I'm gonna be talking about it in the next video. So if you guys want to see it in the next video, 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 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. MMO RPG 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 bull crap 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 increase 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 gonna 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 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 five 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 gonna 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 into both sides, but your device is powered off and it's not getting any signal, it actually turns off. So check that out. 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, and 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 120 Hertz. 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, cause 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 and be like, yeah, where does this one go? And it'll change colors. That would actually be pretty sweet, right? Yeah? Or you can 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, Brendan, 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 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 five volt, ground, transmitter five 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's actually going to be the RGB component. 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 gonna 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 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 15 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 display port and USB cables. If you haven't had enough of this video though, stick around for this message from FreshBooks, our sponsor. FreshBooks is the small business accounting solution that's custom built for how you wanna work. And it's a simple way for you to be more productive, more organized and to get paid faster. With FreshBooks, you can create professional looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster. You can see when your client has seen your invoice so you can put an end to the guessing games and you can take the whole experience with you on the go with their fully featured apps for iOS and Android. For an unrestricted 30 day trial, head to freshbooks.com slash tech tips and then just enter Linus Tech Tips in the how did you hear about us section. So thanks for watching guys. Hope you enjoyed this video. I'm not like really sad that I've ruined it now but I'm also really happy that I know how it works. So.