$500 fiber optic HDMI cable delivers flawless 48 Gbps performance across a staggering 990 feet — crushes 8K at 60 Hz and 4K at 120 Hz over long distances

$500 fiber optic HDMI cable delivers flawless 48 Gbps performance across a staggering 990 feet — crushes 8K at 60 Hz and 4K at 120 Hz over long distances

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News , or add us as a preferred source , to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he\u2019s not working, you\u2019ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-19/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Hassam Nasir Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

Spuwho It's not the fiber that is special, its the transceivers in those dongles that are driving the price. Probably HDMI over 100GbE. Reply

Stomx Fiber optic HDMI is indeed great. I'm missing very much USB3/USB4 over fiber optic, nobody makes ones. Existing USB3 cables are total disaster, very thick, need re-translators every few meters, barely succeed to work for 20-30m distances. Optical one would easily transmit even USB5 over the fiber and would also need couple standard wires to supply 5V (which better upconvert to 24V and downconvert back to 5V in the final dongle) Reply

-Fran- Is there a mention to increase latency? Since this is digital to digital, there has to be a penalty? Regards, Reply

Crawdadius I've been using one of these to connect my gaming PC in the office to my TV in the living room about 60 feet away. It works great. I'm able to take advantage of all the fancy features of my TV. 4K, 120Hz, HDR, VRR and 5.1 channel audio all working as expected without any perceptible latency. Another major advantage is that you can pull this MPO Fiber cable once and then in the future when new HDMI or Displayport standards are released, you can (hopefully) just upgrade the transceiver at each end without having to pull another cable. To get some usable USB ports out in the living room I found a USB over CAT6 extender kit from AV Access for about $60. This supports USB 2.0 up to ~200 feet. This lets me plug in a wireless keyboard, Bluetooth dongle and Xbox controller wireless adapter so I can pair controllers easily. This setup has been super reliable. I use it every day and I'd recommend it to anybody who wants their beefy gaming rig to pull double-duty for console-like couch gaming. Reply

ferdnyc (From the article): "The cable isn’t entirely devoid of copper wires; some are still used for low-priority communication and power, but the majority of the signal is carried via fiber optic strands." Incorrect. Ruipro do offer "hybrid" fiber-optic cables too, but this is not one of them. The packaging explicitly characterizes it as a "pure fiber optic" cable, as it uses no copper outside of the transceiver heads. Reply

spoidz How flexible would this cable be? For instance at the point where it has to bend from the attic down through the wall to a floor level connection plate or out of the wall? Does it have to be in a protective case/channel if I want to just run it along the floorboard or under or does it need protection in an unheated attic during winter? Reply

jp7189 Having had direct experience with ruipro, I can say I'm pretty impressed. There was a slip of paper in the box with the signal test results of my cable which speaks to attention to detail. Also, in the early days of the RTX 3080 (which was notorious for hdmi issues), I asked some simple questions of ruipro customer service to try to figure out where the signal dropouts were coming from and they sent a brand new cable no questions asked to help rule that out as a problem. The problem wasn't the cable, it was the card. In any case, thats the kind of customer service that makes lifelong customers. Reply

stuff and nonesense -Fran- said: Is there a mention to increase latency? Since this is digital to digital, there has to be a penalty? Regards, Over a distance of approx 300m .. negligible 1.5 microseconds at 200,000,000 meters per second (less for the speed of light in a vacuum) Reply

Crawdadius spoidz said: How flexible would this cable be? For instance at the point where it has to bend from the attic down through the wall to a floor level connection plate or out of the wall? Does it have to be in a protective case/channel if I want to just run it along the floorboard or under or does it need protection in an unheated attic during winter? It is a standard MPO, Type A OM3 multimode fiber cable, common in data center applications. It is a little unusual that it's listed as a "7-core" cable on their website. Usually you see 8, 12, 16, or 24 strand MPO fiber cables. A general rule is that the minimum bend radius you want with fiber like this is 10x the outer diameter of the cable itself. I just measured mine and it's ~3mm thick, so I'd be pretty confident that it would work fine with a 3cm bend in the run. Basically I'd treat it the same as CAT6. Don't kink it, but if you're confident pulling CAT6 around a bend, then it shouldn't pose any issue with this fiber. Also – the fiber provided by RUIPRO has an armored sheath for added durability. Definitely fine to tuck along the floorboard or leave unprotected in your attic or in your walls. They're more durable than you'd think, but I still try to be as gentle as I can when I'm pulling and avoid stepping on it.. I ran this across the basement ceiling in my house and pulled it up through the wall behind my TV. I have a pretty packed conduit behind the TV so it took some serious tugging but it didn't damage the fiber in any way. Reply

Stomx Crawdadius said: They're more durable than you'd think, but I still try to be as gentle as I can when I'm pulling and avoid stepping on it.. I use different brand fiber – iBirdie – for few years already, it is lying on hard floor and carpet, all stepping on it, so far no problem (lazy to hide it inside the walls. Will probably move it close to baseboard eventually) Reply

Key considerations

  • Investor positioning can change fast
  • Volatility remains possible near catalysts
  • Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows

Reference reading

More on this site

Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.

Leave a Comment