Cables are cables

Years of building PCs has taught me that most of what's inside is variations on a theme. Don't get me wrong; when I put together a new box there are a few things on which I do not skimp: hard drives, processors, memory, motherboard. I buy only top-name components in those areas, as I've learned the hard way those aren't the places to cut corners. For most other stuff, however, I'll buy the cheapest thing on Newegg with a decent rating: card readers, PSU, optical drive, case fans, monitor... It's all the same junk with a different sticker slapped on it.

One of the trends I've found enormously amusing is watching all the suckers spending outrageous amounts of money for premium cabling. Audio cable, video cable, HDMI... this has been an ongoing scam for years. Now a few "entrepreneurs" (con artists) are selling so-called premium data cabling that will supposedly increase your transfer rates and is a "must-have" for use with your fancy-smancy new solid-state drive, lest you not get all the bang for your buck. I call bullshit of course, but that's just my gut and years of experience talking; nothing scientific to back it up.

Fortunately, Maximum PC also caught a whiff of odius bovine excrement and decided to run a few tests on this super-cable stuff. Here's what they found:

There is virtually no difference between a brand-new SATA 6Gb/s marked cable made this year and one produced nearly eight years ago as far as performance goes. Expensive cable, cheap cable; long cable, short cable—none of it seemingly made a real difference. If anything, the minor variances in performance can be attributed to variances in the benchmark or the SSD.

During our testing, we also tested out a couple of often not recommended practices: bending your SATA cable at right angles. Many motherboard vendors recommend against putting right-angles into the cables during system builds so we took a cable and put about 15 right-angle kinks in it: no difference. We also took a 36-inch cable and tightly wrapped around a hot PSU cable: no difference.

What about joining two 36-inch cables end-to-end using male-to-male connectors? That’s about 30-inches outside the SATA spec for cable length: No. Frakking. Difference.

You can be sure, however, that "premium cables" will keep selling at premium prices. P.T. Barnum knew of what he spoke.