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Debunking Gold-Plated USB Cable Myths

2014-11-06
hey Ron this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we were talking about this this is a gold plated USB cable I bought on Amazon gold-plated and the reason I use scare quotes is because it is marketing BS I bought this only so I can show you to not buy it so I took a hit for you you're welcome let's talk about why gold-plated cables for USB is complete marketing BS why you should never buy it first of all this cable is plated only on the outside there are no gold plates on the inside on the pins you know the things that actually connect to the computer the receiving pins are what connect to the pins here the plate on the outside is only to protect the house the USB you can actually remove this this housing the metal housing and it would still work because it doesn't carry a signal this cable on Amazon was advertised as improving the signal and decreasing the latency and with keyboards a lot of the time you'll see companies say it's gold-plated it decreases the latency so your keyboard inputs faster so there's less lag between keystrokes and that's why it's better for gaming don't listen to that it's BS and aside from the fact that a lot of them are only plated on the outside which carries no signal to begin with and therefore it cannot decrease latency and cannot improve the signal the ones that are gold-plated on the Pens they're plugging into a system that isn't gold-plated on the receiving side so metallurgically it might actually be worse for the the cable in the long run because it's not a like to like connection it's it's aluminum or whatever on gold and let's say everything is gold let's say it's receiving gold-plated it's going in gold-plated even then there are so few pins on USB it's five for USB three so few pins it's not gonna make any difference whatsoever in the accuracy of the signal in the latency of the signal and besides keyboards aren't exactly high high pull rate devices anyway you might get a thousand Hertz or something it's not like a video card where you have dozens of pins and they need to be played gold they need to be really accurate and it's operating that gigahertz right so it's a lot faster on a video card CPU it makes sense to have gold pins because there are thousands of pins and they need to be accurate they need to be fast its operating at several gigahertz this is not fast it doesn't need to be as accurate because frankly it doesn't produce the level of output that something like a CPU does which is on a completely different level technologically and the gold plating really is just to make you spend more money so do not buy gold plated connectors simply because it says gold plated if you're buying it because the cable as a whole in the case of audio equipment is better great do that maybe audio equipment analog equipment that stuff it can make sense your gold plated for completely different reasons normally because it's tied with the thickness and the quality of the cable inside USB don't go out and buy this just because it's gold-plated by any other USB connector you can buy these if it's cheap anyway like why not but don't expect it to be faster don't go around saying your keyboard is low latency as a result of it so that is why gold plated connectors are BS and why you should not be spending more money for them and audio is a little different but I will see you all next time peace
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