damaged monitor cable

Lakeland · 2 Mar 2006 at 11:50

my old monitor has got a damaged cable right by the plug (that goes into gfx card)

i think its a wire thats been streched and has snapped, i still get an image but its pink! it used to work when i moved the cable into a certain position but its gone completly now.

would it be a good idea to cut the cable insulation and try to repair with solder?

what is the round plastic thing that is before the connector? this is where the cable is damaged so ideally i need to cut this off, does it actually do anything?

failing that, can i get a full replacement cable or is that going to be a difficult job?

Werewolf · 2 Mar 2006 at 12:00

With a lot of high end/better monitors the cable isn't captive (soldered into the monitor itself) for these reasons, and can be replaced just by undoing two thumbscrews (basically the cable is the same at both ends), for this sort of reason.

However i'm assuming you'll have looked at the monitor end and ruled this out

With regards to the cable, you can repair it, although you may get signal degredation (which can affect the picture quality, especially at higher resolutions/refresh rates).
I can't really recommend attempting a repar without knowing how good you are with the soldering iron.

The round bit you've mentioned sounds like an iron ferrite core, these are usually used to help remove RF interference picked up by the cable*, you can remove it, but you risk getting increased interference.
A lot of them can however be moved, as long as the cable isn't looped round it.

*It's the same basic idea as the one most cases wrap the front panel connecting wires round, or you find on a lot of USB cable.

Lakeland · 2 Mar 2006 at 12:06

the only way i could see to replace the cable is to take the case to bits.. not something id be happy trying unless it was worst case case its going to have to get scrapped anyway.

ill give it a go and see what happens..

MrWhippy · 2 Mar 2006 at 13:19

the round thing is also sometimes called an RF choke.

i had a similar thing happen on my monitor a while back.
i thought about fixing it with solder like you suggested, but i also wondered if the cable was a standard part, so i took the back off the monitor and compared it to the cable on a duff monitor i happened to have in the garage (that had been waiting on me taking it to the tip).

unfortunately they had different connectors on at the monitor end. however, they had the same number of wires, and it wasn't too tricky to swap the connectors over. just needed to spend a while first with a multimeter drawing diagrams of which colour wire went to which socket hole, corresponding to which pin at the graphic card end.

how nice of the monitor manufacturers to have not settled on a standard wiring colour scheme

ps. if you do decide to have the back off the monitor be very carefull. the tube and some of the other components can store VERY high voltages which they'll be more than happy to pass on to you. read up on TV/monitor repair or better still get someone who does know what they're doing to help.