Video cable wire gauge

[Logistics]

I've noticed that the majority of the time the wire gauge is not shown on vga cables. Is there a way to determine this by the other writing on the cable? I noticed they all tend to say 2919 on them, but I found one that said 2990 and tried it. Works fine. I did find a single cable that said 28-gauge, but it looked chesp so I decided against it.

Just looking for cables with healthy gauge.

[mariushm]

Re: Video cable wire gauge

That's the least of your problems when you look at vga cables.

The better vga cables have ferrite rings at both ends, have signal and ground wire pairs shielded from each other, there's shielding over the whole cable to reduce interferences...

The gauge of the wire doesn't matter much if the shielding is only the pvc around the copper wire.

Also don't rely on what's written on the cable for stuff made in China. Like the cheaper network and audio cables available these days, vga cables are made with CCA (copper clad aluminum) instead of only copper so a thinner vga cable may actually be better than a thicker but cheaper cable.

[Elysarian]

Re: Video cable wire gauge

I've had cheapo (ebay/chinese) cables that won't go above 800x600 and others that just plain don't work...

Gauge-wise I've seen 26AWG on 6-foot (2 metre) cables in the past - thicker on longer cables is better to reduce the voltage drop over the length but you will sacrifice flexibility.

The main reason the gauge isn't printed on the outer is generally because there are other signal wires in there that may be thicker or thinner depending on purpose (technically only need a maximum of 10 conductors for component video: 2 each for red, green, blue, h-sync and v-sync)