Cat 5 or 6 for lan q

[specbfast]

I want to upgrade my LAN (3 computers on it) to Gigabit. I now have all the computers with Gigabit, and a Gigabit router. I heard that I need to use Cat 6 cable, not Cat 5 - is this true? What are the advantages to Cat 6? Is this important for on-line gaming?

[pave_spectre]

If you have good quality cat5 cable, it will handle gigabit ethernet easily.
For online gaming unless you have a massive internet connection it is not going going to come close to LAN speeds so which category cable you use should make no difference.

In conclusion, if you already have cat5, use that, it should handle the job nicely.

[Rick]

Also if the cat5 cable is new (a year old .)
You may find it is cat5e and will handle anything the gigabit can throw at it

I'm doing it today with all but one cable on my network :)

[Variable]

There is no advantages to having gigabit routers and network cards for on line gaming. Your internet connection is no where near 100Mbps, let alone 1000. A 10Mb nic card will be enough for any broadband connection that I know of. It won't hurt, but if someone tells you you need to upgrade everything to gigabit for online gaming they are giving you bad information.

Open Task Manager if you have Windows XP, click the Networking tab. You can see the percentage of Network utilization on your NIC. On a 100Mb nic pulling down a file at 6Mbps you would be using 6% of the link speed. Online gaming does not use that much bandwidth. I did some google searching and the stats I see are 20-40MB per hour. I know my DSL connection works really well for online games and it is 1.5Mb connection.