Thread: Cat 6 or Cat 5e

In my tests, Cat 6 cabling didn't offer a significant increase in performance over Cat 5e or Cat 5, so I wouldn't worry too much about upgrading existing cabling. If you're buying new network cables, though, I wouldn't skimp with older Cat 5e, as Cat 6 will give your network more room to breathe should you upgrade to 10 Gigabit in future.

If you're after significantly better networking performance, make sure you are getting the best from your adapters. Most PCs and motherboards these days have Gigabit adapters, so don't throttle them with a 100Mbit hub. Buy a Gigabit switch: doing so saw my network speeds leap from an average of 40Mbitslsec to around 200Mbitslsec; indeed the 261Mbitslsec measured this month is my best yet, and a respectable result for a Gigabit network after overheads have been taken into consideration.



Beyond this, ensure your adapters are running their latest drivers and see if you can enable Jumbo packets or frames on each; if you can, you may see a further boost for larger files.

Ultimately, if you transfer lots of files between local PCs, it's worth ensuring your network is running optimally. I'd be interested to hear your reports, especially if you've achieved particularly high speeds on your Gigabit network.