Most new PC cables are always pinned out the same. HDMI, DVI, SATA, USB, and 1394 specifically. There’s no such thing as a crossover, null modem, fake-flow-control, or whatever. So the only thing you’d be testing them for is bad or intermittent continuity, which this tester isn’t stellar at. (As I mentioned in the Paladin review way back, it only energizes one wire at a time, so testing for intermittent shorts or opens would require an advance-and-wiggle cycle for each wire in the cable.)

Where this unit really excels, and where mine gets most of its use, is for testing and debugging RS232 cables. Particularly the DE9-to-RJ45 adapters so common (and incompatible) among Cisco, Adtran, Cabletron, and a dozen other vendors. Of course, some older gear has DB25 connectors for the same signals, so I have adapters to go betwixt and among those flavors too.

Whenever there’s a question about whether this will work with that, I dig up the pinouts for both devices, sketch out a wiring map that should put the right signals in the right places, then test the adapter in question to see if its blinky pattern jives with my estimation. It’s important to do it in that order, lest I just “go along with” an almost-right configuration.