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[Alebrije]

So a "simple" question that still can't find a decent answer. I am renovating some areas in Home and need to install network cables. In the market there are cat 6,7,8 cables and also have different shields like SFTP, FTP,STP.

All say are the best for gaming , obviously the cat 6 are the cheapest. So basically what is the best cost/performance cable for Home gaming? Does cat 8 extra cost is worth ? Does shield impact it's performance?

Thanks for your answers.

 

[REDRZA MWS]

Cat 6e

 

[Superkewl]

I use whatever gives gigabit. Think that is cat 6. No need to use more since that is what my service caps at.

I worked for a cable company back in the day, and was under the impression that stuff like shielding only plays a part when it comes to analog signals, not digital? Thought was was the scam behind stuff like monster cables. I don't know, I have been removed from that stuff for almost 20 years now.

 

[T4keD0wN]

Cat6 FTP, just get ftp for the peace of mind if youre worried.

 

[winjer]

What matters for the cable is the distance and the speed of your network.
I suppose this is for your home, so heavy shielding is probably not necessary.

I doubt you need more than a Cat6e. That is 10gbps, over 100meters.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

The different numbers just indicate sustained transfer speeds, there's nothing in gaming that would require cat 7 or 8, or heck 6 or 5e, since none of them affect ping in a meaningful way.

 

[Gaiff]

Cat5e and above is fine. Cat8 honestly won’t do anything for you as the bandwidth it supports is far above what consumers need. Higher Cat might help with signal degradation over distances. You can also get better-graded cables now if you plan on keeping them for a while. I have a 1 Gbit connection going through a 50 feet Cat6 cable and it supports up to 10 Gbit over 55 meters, so I won’t need to upgrade it for the next 10 years most likely.

Beyond just gaming, I look at download speeds. Nothing while you game will saturate even a Cat3 cable, but if you want top-tier download speeds (at least on PC, dunno about consoles) you want a fast CPU, drive, and connection speed. Of course, the cable also needs to support the bandwidth.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Every room has a Cat5e socket that runs to a box in the utility room with an 8 port switch. The Router sits in the living room as it's the central point of the house, I have the router send one cable to the wall leading to the 8 port switch and that sends the wired internet to the rest of the house. My main PC is connected directly to the router in the living room.
After all that most devices in the house just use the wireless. My main PC and my Sons PC in his room use the wired. All other wired ports in the house just sit there doing nothing.

 

[UltimaKilo]

Cat 8, but you'd be fine with Cat 6. Just get what is cheapest.

 

[Kuranghi]

Everyone said the answer, it doesnt matter a fuck, buy whatever.

Btw, whats the story behind your name OP, named after the mythical creature?

 

[MisterXDTV]

For a gigabit connection, Cat. 5e is more than enough

 

[cash_longfellow]

 

[RoboFu]

persian

 

[Quasicat]

The house is cat 6e and all of my cables are the same. Even the stuff that runs mostly locally (like my Plex server) don’t really need more than that. My Xbox, PS5, Mac, and Apple TV are the only things hardwired. Everything else is over WiFi. Now that I’m getting some new devices, that’s what will need to be upgraded next.

 

[Bernardougf]

Im more of a dog person.. sorry

 

[Big Baller]

gold

 

[Power Pro]

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

No idea, but it's a long one that looks like a ribbon. I also game on wifi and don't see a difference.

 

[struggler_guts]

They made new ones? I still call them all cat5

 

[Knightime_X]

You need a cat69.
I heard those are nice.
Joking aside, I use cat6 and its all good.

 

[El Muerto]

I dropped cat5e in my house years ago and it's been fine. I doubt i'll sub to a multi-gigabit internet connection, but if i do i can tape the new cat-whatever to existing wire and fish it through, ez pz. You'll want shielded though if it's going in walls. If you dont get shielded you will get interference from appliances such as the furnace, ac, fridge, etc. Also get a quality cable like full copper, not copper clad. Copper clad can degrade over time.

 

[DGrayson]

Cat7

 

[deriks]

Ethernet cables in today era doesn't need to be more than 6A, and that's the best scenario now

Let me explain:
Today's consoles and PCs uses gigabit connection, which means that your port will mostly reaches 1gb max. Cat5e can go as far as 700mb if all planets are aligned, but we usually uses 300mb as a standard for this type of cable - electricity and other stuff interferes the quality, so there's that. Cat 6 can go for 1gb easily, so this cable can do fine for general cases.

One can choose Cat6A, which can go for 2.5gb, but like I said before, most Ethernet ports are 1gb, so won't be the exact choice right now. You can pick this cable if you have too much eletric stuff around, so the connection will be more stable and the 1gb will be guaranteed

With a PC, if you have the latest card, of course you can go higher, even more than 10gbs and using fiber instead of copper, but if your internet connection is not more than 1gb, use just a normal Cat 6 or Cat6A

 

[DaleinCalgary]

Blue one

 

[Quixz]

Don't judge me too harshly but I game on WiFi cause I'm too lazy to drill the walls..

 

[OverHeat]

wifi 7 run…

 

[MisterXDTV]

I dropped cat5e in my house years ago and it's been fine. I doubt i'll sub to a multi-gigabit internet connection, but if i do i can tape the new cat-whatever to existing wire and fish it through, ez pz. You'll want shielded though if it's going in walls. If you dont get shielded you will get interference from appliances such as the furnace, ac, fridge, etc. Also get a quality cable like full copper, not copper clad. Copper clad can degrade over time.

Depends on the length of the cable

But 5 Gigabit on Cat 5e is basically guaranteed for 55 meters

 

[Skifi28]

As long as you stay away from cat5, everything else is more than fine for your home.

 

[PaintTinJr]

So a "simple" question that still can't find a decent answer. I am renovating some areas in Home and need to install network cables. In the market there are cat 6,7,8 cables and also have different shields like SFTP, FTP,STP.

All say are the best for gaming , obviously the cat 6 are the cheapest. So basically what is the best cost/performance cable for Home gaming? Does cat 8 extra cost is worth ? Does shield impact it's performance?

Thanks for your answers.

If you are going into walls and the cost to switch out is much more than cabling costs then you go with the best you can afford, and any telecoms company worth their salt does the same. It is the reason why the UK telecom network fitted by the Post office(spun out to become BT) fitted cables to all local streets in the 60's or something and (formerly BT and then BT) Openreach have been able to use them even today for up to 50Gbit/s ADSL to homes when the original provision per phoneline per house was just a 8kbit/s (8khz uncompressed analogue audio) long before personal computers were even a thing.

If not into walls, then go with what you need that's quality cabling and cheap. At under 5metre distances even an old CAT5 should perform equally well as the other higher CAT cables for 1000Mbit/s or less.

But in saying all that, the least latency solution is usually about getting an expensive router of the Mikrotik variety running RouterOS or similar, primarily so you can set the port used on the router to a fixed spec for a console to match the cable. So that you might disable auto negotiate, disable 10Mbit & 100Mbit and fix the port to 1000Mbit - and do the same on the console with manual network settings.

The router software and the router options are likely more important for latency than the cable, which is really just about error rates, verses bandwidth versus cabling distance, more for highspeed downloads.

Sometimes a cheaply made higher rated cable will perform worse than a quality lower rated cable.

 

[TintoConCasera]

It's yellow

 

[salva]

I use dog 6

 

[chakadave]

Cat 6e

6e isn't a real standard.

6a is the shielded 10gb version thicker wires

5e and above is gigabit.

OP i'm planning to run 6a but aonly beucase I got the cable for free. Anything 5e or above is gigabit. For shielded you need special and more expenvie ends and patch panels. I'd say just get standard cat6 and use standard keystones and patch panels.

 

[K' Dash]

Cat 6e

Same, whole house has 15 access points and wired with 6a, which is overkill since it supports up to 10Gb. For Wireless I use a TP Link Deco Mesh with WiFi 6e support.

 

[NeonDelta]

Same, whole house has 15 access points and wired with 6a, which is overkill since it supports up to 10Gb. For Wireless I use a TP Link Deco Mesh with WiFi 6e support.

Are the mesh’s as good as they advertise? My fiancées house WiFi barely reaches the bedroom and she only has 26mb so it’s sometimes a struggle to stream stuff.

 

[SyberWolf]

its either CAT6 or CAT7 dont remember.

 

[ThaMonkeyClaw]

House is wired with CAT 6a along with CAT 6a patch cables, but just running a standard 1Gbps network still, nothing fancy, 10Gbps it still too expensive, but I will eventually make the jump once the prices come down a little more

 

[K' Dash]

Are the mesh’s as good as they advertise? My fiancées house WiFi barely reaches the bedroom and she only has 26mb so it’s sometimes a struggle to stream stuff.

Since I have a wired access point on every room of the house I’m using the dedicated backhaul for all 4 mesh routers, the xe75 model, I’m getting the full download speed at every corner of the house.

 

[ReyBrujo]

I wired my home 5 or 6 years ago so it's a Cat5.

 

[chakadave]

I wired my home 5 or 6 years ago so it's a Cat5.

Bummer. They had 5e and 6 back then.

It’s probably 5e.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

Bunch of peasants. I got Cat 9 cable with gold plated connectors for extra low ping and zero interference.

 

[AtomicStarving]

Vention CAT8 cotton braided

 

[digital_ghost]

I bought an $8 cat 8 cable from Amazon. Noticed faster speeds on steam downloads. I get around 100MB/s (megabytes not megabits)

Which is the fastest i ever had with gigabit internet.

85GB game downloads in 11 minutes.

 

[The Cockatrice]

You dont need higher than 5e for gaming and short distances cables. go with 6a, anything higher is just for data servers and whatever.

 

[KINGMOKU]

Depends on what your doing with your internet.

I use CAT 7e currently, but may upgrade to CAT 8 for the crazy bandwidth, but for a different reason then gaming.

CAT 6 seems fine for most at home.

 

[digdug2]

Don't judge me too harshly but I game on WiFi cause I'm too lazy to drill the walls..

If it works for you, then that's really all that matters.

 

[RagnarokIV]

Big balls cable

 

[calistan]

You dont need higher than 5e for gaming and short distances cables. go with 6a, anything higher is just for data servers and whatever.

Also, the higher category ones have thicker shielding and a rigid cross-shaped separator inside the cable, so you need wider trunking to accommodate the cables and they won't bend around corners very easily. Indoors, in an average sized home, you don't need those heavy duty ones.

 

[digdug2]

Are the mesh’s as good as they advertise? My fiancées house WiFi barely reaches the bedroom and she only has 26mb so it’s sometimes a struggle to stream stuff.

I have 3 TP-Link Deco XE75s and can highly recommend them. I have the main one in the basement in the utility room (in the middle of the house), then have 2 upstairs on different sides of the house (2000 sqft). I get full signal throughout the house and 500Mbps Down/Up everywhere in the house (though my fiber Internet is rated at 2Gbps Down/Up and I'm using Cat6A from the Fiber modem directly to the main Deco).

 

[asdasdasdbb]

If it works for you, then that's really all that matters.

WiFi is really good now. You're probably not losing much by using it over ethernet.

 

[Shifty1897]

6e is all you'll need