Has anyone ever had a set up that was picky about DVI cables? I've been using whatever random old DVI cables I could find laying around for years. I bought a bunch at Goodwill a few years ago and they all work great.
Last week our local radioshack closed and I got a couple of 6 foot "Gigaware" DVI-D cables at 95% off. Since my main machine takes priority over all others (and I could use the extra 6 inches of length on the new cables) I decided to just use a new cable for my system as they are slightly longer, sturdier and have ferrites (not sure how much this matters for DVI-D).
For some reason it was terribly inconsistent. It seemed to work fine at first. Then, some times I wouldn't be able to get the DVI input to register when switching back from VGA (I have two system hooked up to this monitor). Other times when turning the system on with the Gigaware cable installed it'd show the startup information, but it was scaled in a 4:3 aspect (normally it will fill the entire screen without stretching), and when Windows tried to load I'd get no picture. It did this several times. When I get this strange 4:3 bootup display and enter the UEFI interface it is a mess! There are sections of the interface missing and the text is all stretched out and ghosty. I thought maybe my system was the culprit, opened up my tower, poked around a bit, saw nothing wrong, tried it again and it worked fine. But the problem came right back after rebooting.
So, I reconnected my old cable and haven't had a single problem for two days. I decided to inspect the new cable, thinking maybe it was defective or damaged on the ends and found a tiny tiny (1mm long, a few hairs breadth) piece of metal in the end of the cable, touching two pins together. Thinking I'd solved it, I removed that bit of metal (which was conductive), tried it again and it STILL doesn't work. I just get "No signal detected". So, I tried the other brand new identical Gigaware cable... and it does the same thing! Hooking up my old Goodwill cable (~5.5', no ferrites) brings the image back immediately and works fine every time.
What gives? I've never seen anything like this. Has anyone ever seen variations in DVI cables or their compatibility? The new cables I bought were sealed in clam shell packages and were in perfect condition. The second cable was barely handled at all as I just wanted to test it, so there's no way I damaged both of them.
All the cables are dual-link. My display is a BenQ XL2720Z running at 1920x1080@120Hz (with blur reduction enabled) on a PNY GTX 970 XLR8, 2500K on an MSI P67a-G43 with an up to date BIOS.
EDIT: Upon inspecting the cables closely, it looks like the pins are much thinner than the ones in the other cables I have. I don't know if this would be enough to cause a problem though... seems unlikely that a cable could be produced, branded and sold at an expensive retail chain without adhering to basic specifications.