Gadgetory

AGN this is Patrick Stone coming at you with a hardware tip today we're going to look at DVI dual link cables and what we want to focus on today is if you buy a dual link cable for three five six dollars you might not be getting the dual link that you think you're getting let's say that you buy a DVI dual link cable and it looks something like this notice the thickness of this cable versus this cable over here when you plug your DVI dual link cable in if you're only using say 1920 by 1080 resolution you may not notice it but when you push to higher resolutions you're probably not going to be able to get that picture we want to make sure it gamers Nexus here that you don't get ripped off so we're going to show you a little tip on how to test this out if you look at these two things you got DVI dual link on my left hand and DVI single link on my right hand the connectors are clearly different and what's happening is we're missing some pins right here in the middle these missing pins are actually missing in the wire section as well so if we look at this DVI dual link cable you may get a dual link cable that is a thin cable instead of a thick one and may have the right connector on it but then no wires for that connector to connect to so what you can do is you can take a digital multimeter like this guy right here I got a fluke you can take a you know twelve dollar version from advanced autoparts or whatever other place you want to go to and they'll do the same thing just need to use the resistance setting here we have a continuity test which creates a nice little audible beep for us when we complete a circuit like that so what we're going to do is we're going to line these two DVI connectors up side-by-side with a little help and then we're going to actually try and do some connectivity so you take both ends of your multimeter and just tap one end like this tap the other end like this and you get that nice audible beep that means that you've got connection so the places that you're really really interested in are columns for and columns v because that's your dual link and so what we're going to do here is we're going to just simply take our probe touch it to the first pin on column 4 and then touch it to the first pin over here on column 4 and we got a nice audible beep that means we got connectivity therefore there's definitely a wire going from this column for pin one over to this column for pin one you do that same same goal test action from column for pin two three column five pin one two three and then you can guarantee that you have what you paid for and again you're probably going to pay a little more for an actual DVI dual link cable so while you're testing if you see something like this I'm going to just go over here and touch column one pin one over here and column one pin one over here notice that I get no audible beat well that's the kind of thing that would warn you that you know what there's no actual wiring between these two pins on this particular cable that's not a big deal because it's a DVI dash D type cable meaning digital only then this particular guy on that pin doesn't even need a wire there because that is an analog signal wire this one's also missing four other pins inside around the slotted part of the connector but those again are also for the analog signal so don't be too weary if you get a DVI - D dual link and that column one pin one doesn't work for your continuity test because it shouldn't again a have to download this is again Patrick stone with gamers Nexus we'll see you guys next time