is there a best ethernet cable?

[Spock_1701]

is there a best ethernet cable or at least a grading for quality or different types?

[Princess Luna]

Not really, they are pretty straight forwards and unless you're going for 10gigabit I doubt they even matter... get whatever you find.

[Electronics Wizardy]

There are the different cats for twisted pair

 

There are sm and mm fibre, and different grades of both.

 

What are you connecting? What speed?

[goto10]

yes, you shouldnt use nothing under cat 5e, and has to be copper, there are cheap versions that dont have copper, those are garbage

 

i only use cat6 now, is a bit more expensive but doesnt give me problems

[Spock_1701]

thanks

 

[TehPlayer14]

8 minutes ago, Princess Luna said:

Not really, they are pretty straight forwards and unless you're going for 10gigabit I doubt they even matter... get whatever you find.

Or long distance cables like 10m+ where signal strength degrades

[Lurick]

10 minutes ago, TehPlayer14 said:

Or long distance cables like 10m+ where signal strength degrades

Copper ethernet cable is rated for 100m and only degrades beyond that where you need some node (usually a switch or dedicated repeater) to repeat the signal and then you get another 100m and so on. Fiber ranges can go anywhere from 300m up to 40km+ depending on the optic and fiber being used.

[Dedayog]

Yes, there actually is a BEST Ethernet cable:

 

https://hothardware.com/news/10000-ethernet-cable-claims-earth-shattering-advancement-in-audio-fidelity-if-youre-stupid-enough-to-buy-it

 

 

[Slayerking92]

2 hours ago, jstudrawa said:

Yes, there actually is a BEST Ethernet cable:

 

https://hothardware.com/news/10000-ethernet-cable-claims-earth-shattering-advancement-in-audio-fidelity-if-youre-stupid-enough-to-buy-it

 

 

i was going to suggest the Denon $500 cable.  $10,000 is just silly.

 

https://www.cnet.com/news/denons-500-ethernet-cable/

 

 

[Dedayog]

4 minutes ago, Slayerking92 said:

i was going to suggest the Denon $500 cable.  $10,000 is just silly.

 

https://www.cnet.com/news/denons-500-ethernet-cable/

 

 

$500 isn't bad.  Folks use $1000 speaker wire.  Everyone needs a market to sell to.

 

Tho that made me lose a bit of respect or Denon.  Use and loved their AVR's for decades now.

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, jstudrawa said:

$500 isn't bad.  Folks use $1000 speaker wire.  Everyone needs a market to sell to.

 

Tho that made me lose a bit of respect or Denon.  Use and loved their AVR's for decades now.

What you need is to buy the $10,000 cable and hook it up to the cheapest Realtek NIC you can find for the ultimate "quality".

Seriously though, most of the time performance is down to the quality of the chipset and drivers of the NIC and "potentially" how good the switch is.  Although in the real world, you will barely notice the difference.  (I say barely because the difference between a cheap Realtek and a cheap Intel usually gains you a little more speed and slightly lower latency/cpu overhead)

Even with all that said, Realtek seem to have upped their game as I got a 2.5Gbit USB-C NIC based on their chip recently and it performs really well.  Although it is 0.26ms ping vs Intel Gigabit at 0.19ms, but probably down to USB overheads rather than the chipset itself.

Back to the topic though, I've never had any problems at Gigabit picking up random cables off eBay, even the flat ones up to 10m.  All the problem I've had have been when trying to correctly terminate my own, especially RJ45 sockets with the punch connectors.