Question regarding damage to HDMI and DP cables?

Inferius · August 25, 2017

So my cat chewed a little bit on the HDMI and DP cables connecting my monitors, and on some of them, there are some minor bite marks but nothing that looks too significant. Should I be concerned with signal issues or anything with the cables due to this damage? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm just super paranoid about this sort of thing.

Oshino Shinobu · August 25, 2017

It's not something to worry about. If the cable is broken, resulting it image issues, you just need to replace it. It won't damage anything so you don't need to worry about trying the cables.

Inferius · August 25, 2017

1 hour ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

It's not something to worry about. If the cable is broken, resulting it image issues, you just need to replace it. It won't damage anything so you don't need to worry about trying the cables.

Thanks for the reply. They still function just fine, but I'm concerned with image quality. If there would be a decrease in quality would it be pretty obvious or would it be as subtle as a color being slightly off?

AshleyAshes · August 25, 2017

6 minutes ago, Inferius said:

Thanks for the reply. They still function just fine, but I'm concerned with image quality. If there would be a decrease in quality would it be pretty obvious or would it be as subtle as a color being slightly off?

No, it's a digital signal, you can't 'slightly change' the image data in that signal, you can only ruin it. You'd have huge chunks of the image clearly distorted and broken, if the cable functioned at ALL. There is no 'maybe' about a digital video signal getting through clearly or not.

Oshino Shinobu · August 25, 2017

9 minutes ago, Inferius said:

Thanks for the reply. They still function just fine, but I'm concerned with image quality. If there would be a decrease in quality would it be pretty obvious or would it be as subtle as a color being slightly off?

It could manifest in many ways, from outright not working to an issue with only part of the image. If you can't notice it, it may as well not be there at all.

Unlike an analogue signal, the quality of the cable doesn't make the image quality better or worse. It will either work or it won't. So you won't get image degradation, but you may get missing sections of image, depending on what part of the cable broke.