The right 25 foot HDMI cable for 4k at 60hz

[spschillerstrom]

I just picked up a 4K TV that supports 4k at 60hz, I ran my current 25ft HDMI cable from my GTX 1080 desktop and was limited to 30hz at 4k. While reading around a little I found out that I will probably need a specific type of HDMI cable (or display port to HDMI?) to achieve the 60hz. I know for a fact the TV and the GPU support 4k at 60hz so the issue has to be the cable. What type of cable am I looking for exactly? I don't buy into any cable gimmicks so I would appreciate being able to achieve the desired result very affordably. On Amazon and Ebay I've seen many "High Speed" HDMI cables that other sites claimed would do what I want. Is all I need to do is look for a cable with "High Speed" in the description? If someone could provide a link to a specific cable that would be great.

Thanks

 

[Solandri]

Short answer: You want the HDMI cables labeled "high speed"
http://www.hdmi.org/consumer/buying_guide.aspx#Choose

Long answer: While in theory cables designed for HDMI 1.4 will work with 2.0, on the longer cables you will run into signal degradation problems with the higher frequency signals needed for HDMI 2.0. So a 25 ft HDMI cable that was marginal for HDMI 1.4 probably won't work with HDMI 2.0. There are two workarounds for this:

• 
  ■ Thicker cables. A HDMI cable carries 19 separate wires (for the simplest version), so each wire needs to be very thin. Thin wires suffer from more signal degradation over distance. You can counteract this by using thicker wires. Unfortunately that makes the cable thick and harder to bend.
  ■ Active cables. The HDMI spec was written assuming passive cables (simple wires) so the signaling voltages aren't very high, which contributes to the quick signal degradation over distance. An active cable simply boosts the signal strength prior to transmitting it over the long thin wires, then drops the signal back within spec at the opposite end prior to sending it to the receiving HDMI device. Early ones were called Redmere HDMI cables, but there are few different varieties of active HDMI cables out there now. Including an expensive one which uses optical fiber for the actual cable run, and uses electrical to optical converters on both ends. (Optical is probably not worth it unless you need a cable over 100 ft.)

Monoprice has a good selection of active HDMI cables. I've used a bunch of them. The ultra-slim ones probably should be avoided - only a few of the ones I've bought have survived years of use. But their Cabernet cables have worked really well.
http://www.monoprice.com/pages/hdmi_cables

 

[spschillerstrom]

Thanks!