My video cable is busted, can some body tell me what kind of video cable is this? Please identify my video cable.

Btw, my monitor is samsung synch master p2270.

It has a VGA connector on one end, and some kind of DVI on the other end – it would be DVI-A if it wasn't missing half of the pins.

Depending on what ports your monitor and your video card have, either VGA to VGA or DVI-I to DVI-I would work just as well, I think. (VGA is an analog connection, though, so DVI is recommended.)

Identification

That appears to be some sort of non-standard DVI-to-VGA cable.

Analysis

The blue end is a standard VGA connector, but the other end is a DVI shell with a non-standard pinout. Since the other end is VGA, then it is obviously meant to be using the DVI-A format (figure 1), but it is missing seven of the pins.

Six of those missing pins are not strictly necessary when using VGA, but your cable is also missing pin 16 which is used to let the system detect when you plug or unplug the monitor while the system is running. If you leave the monitor plugged in all the time, then this isn’t a problem, but if you switch it with a laptop or something, then the system will not be able to detect the monitor being plugged in or removed, so it would not be able to adapt and automatically start or stop using it. You should still be able to manually tell the drivers/software to scan for it, but that’s inconvenient.

Replacement

When you look for a replacement, you can either use a VGA cable or a DVI cable, but you’ll need a VGA-DVI adapter dongle (figure 2). Make sure to get the right kind of dongle; check that the genders on the ends of the adapter match (are opposite of) the ends of the cable and the ports on the video-card and monitor.

If you use a DVI cable, make sure that is a DVI-I cable (it has the four single pins around the wide, flat pin), otherwise it won’t work with a VGA signal, even with an adapter.

Recommendation

That said, your monitor definitely supports a digital signal, so assuming your video-adapter has a DVI connector (which it should if it was made in the last decade or so), you would be better off just getting a DVI cable and using it straight (no adapters, just DVI-to-DVI).

In that case, since your monitor’s maximum resolution is 1920×1080, you don’t have to worry about dual-link, so any DVI cable, other than DVI-A should suffice.

Images

Figure 1: DVI connectors

Figure 2: VGA-DVI adapter dongle