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PowerColor adds premium HDMI cables to high-end cards: waste of money?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 10 February 2009, 11:21

Tags: PowerColor (6150.TWO)

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Partners whose business it is to sell graphics cards based on either NVIDIA or ATI's GPUs often find it hard to differentiate their wares - one Radeon HD 4870 is much like another, and most prospective buyers tend to look toward price.

PowerColor has teamed up with a/v firm KONNET, and will be bundling in FidelityHD HDMI cable with its Radeon HD 4870 X2, and the ExpressHD standard HDMI cable with the Radeon HD 4850/70 range.



Perhaps I'm just a cynic of these kinds of bundles, but an HDMI cable is an HDMI cable. Being digital, it either works correctly or it doesn't, and having 24k gold-plated connectors is more a gimmick than a useful extra, I reckon.

I've got three HDMI cables going into my TV, from an Xbox 360, Sky HD+, and Sony Blu-ray player. The cables cost between £3 and £27. Try as I might, inducing purchase-justification disorder, I cannot believe I paid £27 for a cable: I see no difference.

Yes, differentiation of a graphics-card bundle is key, but we just hope that PowerColor doesn't hike the price up by, say £15 to compensate.


Looking at current online pricing in the US, PowerColor's Radeon HD 4870 X2 is currently available for $424.99, and the HD 4870 1GB for $234.99, so there's a decent premium on the former, even taking the $459.99 retail price into account.


HEXUS Forums :: 12 Comments

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Posted by Woodchuck2000 - Tue 10 Feb 2009 12:07
The only reason to buy a premium digital cable is that they're generally better built, and therefore less likely to fall apart, than cheap ones. That said, unless you're re-arranging your equipment a lot, that's quite unlikely to be a problem anyway…

There's definitely some value in including an HDMI cable as they're fundamentally useful, but if it costs more than another card plus cheapo cable I'd always go for the latter.

I'm still amazed by the number of people who claim that pricey cables give “…brighter colours and deeper blacks…” without taking a second to consider that it's impossible for the reasons you state in the article. It's digital, people!
Posted by Fraz - Tue 10 Feb 2009 12:32
Gah, I'm sick of this snake oil crap.

There are only two reasons to build a digital cable out of better/tighter-spec components:

1) To be within specifications (i.e. having a nicely open eye-diagram/below min-spec bit-error rate) over a longer transmission distance.

2) Make it less likely to fall apart.


A digital cable either meets the specs for a certain cable length, or it doesn't - in which case it shouldn't be sold. And yet people still fall for this snake-oil nonsense. :angst:
Posted by cheesemp - Tue 10 Feb 2009 12:46
I given up trying to explain a digital cable is a digital cable to people - I just have a big smile on my face whenever I see someone purchase one. Still its no different to PC world charging £15 for a Belkin USB cable when Tesco do a non-belkin for £3 and Ebuyer for about 80p!
Posted by Steve - Tue 10 Feb 2009 13:54
You should see what state the signals end up in on the PCBs within the hardware the cables are connected to.

Having anything other than an adequate digital cable is pointless, from a signal point of view at least. From a build-quality perspective, maybe.
Posted by rainparade - Tue 10 Feb 2009 15:12
Unfortunately, unlike say an IDE cable, an HDMI looks a lot like an analogue cable, making it easier to push the same cost=quality sales techniques.

I was having my hair cut just the other day when one of the hair dressers was strongly advising his customer to spend £50 on a ‘decent’ HDMI cable for his new Playstation, in order to get a sharper picture…

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