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Cat 5 or cat 6?

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
Got a new PC at work, and there were a couple of cables around. One was cat 5 enhanced (?), the other was cat 6. Would it make a difference which one was used? I would use the cat 6 but it's too short, and was wondering what the difference is. Any networking geeks?

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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    If you're only using 10/100mbps, then no odds at all. Both are even fine for gigabit...
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    there honestly is very very little difference in performance between Cat5e and Cat6, Even over a gigabite ethernet network, however with 5e you may have a "small" amount of slow down with large data transfers but this is hardly noticeable
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    SkiveSkive Posts: 15,286 Skive's The Limit
    wooooooooah wrote: »
    Got a new PC at work, and there were a couple of cables around. One was cat 5 enhanced (?), the other was cat 6. Would it make a difference which one was used? I would use the cat 6 but it's too short, and was wondering what the difference is. Any networking geeks?

    No.

    Supposedly cat6 will succeed cat5 but in my time spent as a data cabler of the data we ran 80% was cat5, 10% was cat6 and 10% was fibre. Even when running new cable networks in universities most of it was cat5.
    Weekender Offender 
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Cheers for the replies!
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    The main difference is that cat6 is slightly more expensive than cat5.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    cat6 was much better than cat5, and was needed for the early gigabit networking spec. However, the gigabit spec actually deployed runs over cat5e, which is a slight improvement over cat5, but isn't as expensive as cat6
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