Yeah well $2 for a cable is dirt cheap, well worth a try dont get me wrong. You just might get better results with the official cable as there will be more shielding on the cabling, gold connectors etc (gold connectors are quite important, as most of the signal quality is actually lost through the connectors, and as gold is a better conductor than the other materials used to make cheaper cables, the signal loss is lessened)
Try the cheap cable, you might be happy with it. Is the monitor you want to play it on a TFT (LCD) monitor? or is it a CRT? (the big things). Either way, you can still do it with the VGA cable, the only problem is, with most CRT monitors you can't actually plug the VGA cable straight into the back as they're designed so the VGA cable isn't detachable. You'll need to get a male-female adapter to stick on the end of the monitor cable and then put your VGA cable onto that.