The RGB HDMI cable ISN'T as dumb as you'd think...

I inevitable you guys hear that I think half the world just died I mean literally just on the inside you guys knew this day was coming this is the Archos 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 $100 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 art course 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 conductor not liquid metal thermal interface material offers maximum cooling performance check it out and keep things cool at the link in the video description [Music] 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 the sheathing here so it's like super light super light take that drabness now the weird thing is that vivifies marketing for this thing is shockingly straightforward and honest for an expensive fancy cable manufacturer MMORPG 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 Vortice net is getting their claims about superior color depth brightness and contrast compared to traditional copper HDMI cables because that is obvious bullcrap and vinify 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 needed that 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 that's like there's a latency penalty for this though this is a 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 it can only work one way so that's why you've got to check carefully 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 I seasoned them now one of the questions that probably jumps to mind when you hear about a cable that has integrated circuits and 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 5 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 microUSB this is just a normal microUSB 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 alright 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 I can't supply enough power like it was poorly designed in the first place because this really does not 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 going to 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 its weakest you can see that's a pretty stark difference also this is cool actually didn't notice this before when you're plugged in to both sides but your device is powered off and it's not getting any signal it actually turns off so check that out now 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 when 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 a hundred and twenty 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 don't see it being that much of a problem and it was while it was climbing around back behind the computer here and fighting with the two different cables that we had running between this because we had it set up before that it occurred to me that while this is an 80 to 100 dollar 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 be like yeah where does this one go and it'll change colors that would actually be pretty sweet right yeah or you could just have a 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 switches 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 Brennan it works as expected it lights up about as much as I could possibly hope given the very limited power source so anything really left to do John take it apart 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 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 what all these guys are over on the other side all these ones that ended up getting disconnected so receiver 5 volt ground transmitter 5 volt I wonder if this is just to do with the RGB control actually that would make sense 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 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 9 and 15 foot sections I think it's because if they did a 6 foot or a 3 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 piece in my attic to run all of the computers in my house using long distance fiber-optic DisplayPort 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 want to work and it's a simple way for you to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster with fresh books 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 comm slash tech tips and then just enter Linus tech tips into how did you hear about a session 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

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,896,314

Rating: 4.8928428 out of 5

Keywords: rgb, hdmi, cable, gaming, connector, tv, monitor, computer, pc, console

Id: nva6oPszm60

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Tiny_Pay]

No its pretty dumb, but we love u anyway Linus <3