Ethernet Cables, do they make a difference?

@billallen10  +1  and a helpful post. Thank you.

Did anyone do a blind test?
Please post your honest results.
It would be nice to see “placebo effect” eliminated.

Do not get me wrong, I love high quality network cables and connectors, but I make mine myself, use high quality cable and connectors and cut them to the length. Why? Because I can and it doesn’t cost me much. Otherwise I’d use cheap cat5, because there is no any network need in the house requiring network speed that cat5 cannot handle.

Thanks to all!!
I did some research on the Net, and bottom line there are definate differences between my CAT6 and a CAT7 cable, basically, shielding individual twisted pairs and whole cable braid shielding. Also, not all CAT7 cables are the same, most boasted 10GB/s @ 600Mhz, but I found one that claimed 10GB/s @ 1000Mhz, there are also stranded and solid core cables. The claims about CAT7 were fairly consistant, in that due to twisting and shielding of the wire pairs and overall cable shielding the potential for noise being introduced in the signal is reduced. How this may improve Streaming SQ has yet to be determined. So, I decided on a CAT7 solid core 10GB/s @ 1000Mhz 10' run for $8 (shipping cost me as much as the cable). I looked at the AQ Vodka and can not understand what makes this cable cost over $500 for a 3M run! There must be something I'm missing here. I will A/B the new $8 CAT7 against my CAT6 and report back my perceived results. By the way, can anyone help me understand the difference between a 600Mhz cable compared to a 1000Mhz cable? Thanks!!

@grm can you also compare to cheap cat5 cable and if you can do a blind test even better.

as for the claims of 10 GB/s - you will not be able to experience this speed.
any computer network card supports 1Gbps (which is 80 times less than the claim above). Capital letter is for bytes per second and low case for bits per second (8 times difference)

DSL modems speed is 15 Mbps
EDSL May go up to 100 Mbps
If you have fiber optic all the way to your house (like I do) you may get up to 1Gbps.
Still regular cat6 handles it no problem.

Cable throupoot is not an issue at all.

10 GB/s rarely seen even in data centers, may be on data fabrics but it is distributed between multiple connections.

Claim may be legit but do you need it? Can other components handle the speed? And better question - why do you need the speed, how much data do you need to move? Do the math...

Hi, acepilot71,
When I return from business, I'll attempt a blind test with a straight CAT5e compared with my new CAT7 and see if my friend can detect a difference. I will then have my friend perform the test on myself to determine if I can consistently confirm which cable is in the system and report the results here. Also, again, I have the question as to what is the difference between a 600Mhz cable and a 1000Mhz cable?
Thanks!