I just finished my build over the weekend (that post will be coming soon once I finish cleaning up my desk) but I wanted to post something I learned rather roughly.

The HDMI cable that I used to test the system wasn't long enough to route to where the tower ended up, so I ran down to Fry's and got one long enough. Forever I've assumed "cables are cables" and I know that Monster is not that much better for the price. Well, I ran into a point where I was proven wrong.

Once I got the computer into place, I ran the longer HDMI cable to the machine and fired it up... only to have "twinkling blue dots" appear on the Windows boot screen and on any sufficiently dark area of the desktop/game/anything. After a good hour of Googling, I was pretty sure I'd gotten unlucky and had a bad card. I called up Gigabyte and worked with them to diagnose what was wrong and even they gave up and said it was a bad card. It wasn't until after I filled out the RMA for NewEgg that I realized something - I hadn't seen that behavior before I put it in its final place. Back when I was using the old HDMI cord.

So I pull the tower back out (but I do not change anything on the innards) and plug it into the first cable. Perfect! No blue twinkling stars! Unplug that, use the longer cable... twinkling stars! I run down to Best Buy (the smaller cable was Dynex, their brand) and buy a longer cable (had to go with Rocketfish, oh well) and get home, put everything in its place... perfection.

Now to figure out how to tell NewEgg that I don't need that return...

TL;DR - Be careful buying longer, bargain HDMI cables - in my case, it made me think my video card was bad

Edit: This is by no means trying to say go and waste money on Monster or otherwise high priced cables. But if you need longer cables due to unusual setups, the cheaper cables might cause problems as it did for me.

Edit 2: Okay, so to see if it was a bad cable (and therefore this entire post is worthless or not) I've gone to Amazon (I have a Prime membership) and bought another of the cheap 12' cables - less than $10. I'll test and get back to all of you. If it works, I'll return the higher-priced cables.