Monoprice Cables and Dell Switches - A Strange Affair

I spent most of my day today trying to replace cabling in our closet to tidy up the place. After purchasing 2 pass through patch panels to route cables from the back of the rack to the front in a neat manner I came across issues with some ports not working and coming online with my Dell switches.

All ports in the pass through jacks tested fine, cables tested fine and the switches worked after testing as well.

After 2 hours of fooling around and trying this and that I found my culprit.

The cables I ordered from Monoprice (in this case 3ft and 1ft yellow Cat6 cables) seem to have their pins clamped a bit higher than other cables I have ordered (especially in this case since I ordered blue 3ft cables in the same order and their pins are placed lower in the RJ-45 ends) and cause a loss of connectivity with my Dell switches.

I am assuming at this point that Dell switches have their "spring" pins set just a tad bit lower than normal as my Fluke tester worked just fine with said yellow cables. Looking under a microscope to compare the blue 3ft to yellow 3ft and 1ft cables I was able to confirm that in fact the pins were in fact higher on them.

What a mess, I will have to return the whole order and reorder new ones (and this time maybe from Cables 2 Go). Be on the lookout for the strangest issues, they can creep up anywhere.