FWIW... Don't know if it's this way on all monitors, but I had a spare dual-link DVI which I tried to run on a 1920x1200 monitor. No display. Switched back to single-link... OK. Perhaps the monitor may be set up so that it will run with only single-link or dual-link and the cables are not interchangeable regardless of the resolution user chooses?
I'm running dual link cables (because I happen to have them spare) on my 1920x1080 displays, and they seem to work ok. Did you make sure the dual link cable was ok, as in not damaged in some way?
Could be. It's new and came with a new monitor. As I was intending to use DP, never checked the dual-link DVI other than trying it on different monitor. I posed the notion as a possibility because some 30" monitors work with either single-link or dual-link but the single-link display is somewhat degraded.
I know my 30 inch monitor will run on a single link cable, but it limits the resolution to 1920x1200 (I think it was) and looks really bad. As far a specifications go, the dual link is the only one that would support the 2560x1600 resolution as I understand.
I believe they also support higher resolutions, though I don't know what the limit is per cable/output.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdmi and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort indicate 3840 x 2160 ("4K") at 60 frames per second is supported both by DisplayPort 1.2 (released 2009-12-22) and HDMI 2.0 (released 2013-09-04). Many 4K televisions only support 4K @ 30Hz because their HDMI is only 1.4 (or 1.4a or 1.4b, which just add some 3D formats, according to Wikipedia). I don't know if any computer video subsystem offers HDMI 2.0, but some offer DisplayPort 1.2.