Gigabit Network - Jumbo Frames, CAT5e Vs. CAT6?

[ZzBloopzZ]

I finally bought a Netgear 8-port gigabit switch which supports Jumbo Frames. However, I will only have 3 PC's out of 10 on gigabit. I just need gigabit speeds for my fileserver and 2 main PC's.

I heard if you are mixing a network with 100/1000Mbit's then Jumbo Frames causes more headache then good. Is this true?

I was always under the impression that CAT6 just had better shielding, so it had less interference and a longer range then CAT5e. Also, that CAT6 future proofs you a little better since it can support up to 2000Mbit. I currently have CAT5e cabling and the 3 PC's on gigabit are 14 feet from each other in the basement, which run along the wall under the carpet. Someone told me I should upgrade to CAT6 because I will see ~20% improvement in throughput. Is this true? If it is then I don't mind replacing all cables to CAT6... but it would be disappointing to see no improvements in transfer rates.

Thanks!

 

[Dew]

Running CAT5e, I can peg my network card at 99% utilization(DUMeter shows 970Mbps average) transferring from my fileservers to RAM (copy x:\filename NUL) with no jumbo frames.

 

[Fint]

Jumbo frames can be useful in a enterprise environment for servers with high CPU load caused by high network traffic, but for the home they really are more trouble than they are worth.

At 100Mb or GigE speeds, a Cat6 cable won't be any faster than a quality Cat5 cable.

 

[ZzBloopzZ]

I'll just replace one cable because that is a very very old Cat5 cable. All my other cables are 2 year old Cat5e's.

Thanks guys!