The latest rearrangement of my desk has had one goal: to get my CPU tower FAR away from me, so the noise does not drive me crazy. Doing this, however, has left my 6-foot DVI cables a little short.

I did not feel like paying a lot, and after hearing good reviews, I went and bought a few monoprice.com’s 10 ft premium 24-AWG DVI cables.

These things are thick. As you can see in the photo, at least three times thicker than a Dell OEM cable. The picture is not really to scale, and because the monoprice.com cable was new and so thick, I could not get it to lie flat.

Seriously, if you could strangle someone with the Dell DVI cable, you could just use the weight and stiffness of the monoprice.com cable to beat someone to death.

I’m not sure if I can draw much from this, though: the new cables are what are known as “dual-link” DVI cables, and the old ones were “single-link.” Dual link cables essentially have twice the number of wires, and are used to provide a digital signal to high-resolution displays such as the Dell 3007FPW and the 30” Apple Cinema Display. Also, for all their thickness, the picture does not really look any different.

But they work, and they were pretty cheap. I’m glad I didn’t go down to CompUSA or Best Buy and end up paying too much…

I bought two cables, and am using them to hook up my dual Dell 2405FPW displays to my machine. They work great so far.