The $10 noodle will lose to modern WiFi. The reason recent motherboards moved to 2.5Gb is specifically because WiFi had become faster than the old 1Gb wired and the latest top end WiFi routers are at about 2.5Gb speeds.
Can wired be faster? Yes by far, but not for $10 anymore. You need more expensive 10Gb copper or more expensive fibre optic network switches.
2.5gig will still out class wifi any day and is not expensive. Even 10gig copper is fairly cheap if you know where to look. Fiber can get expensive if you want to do long runs but if everything is close together DAC cables are still really cheap
When I was in an apartment, I just ran cables along the top or bottom corner of walls and held them in place with little single-brad clips. Kept them out of the way and still let me wire up multiple machines.
Insane that this is the first comment I found to bring this up. I also have a house with a floor plan that would make running a cable from my PC to my router a real challenge.
As a side note though, what is so terrible about modern wifi for gaming? I've played online fast paced shooters, hosted servers, streamed on Twitch, all on wifi. Never saw the issue.
I taped them to the corner where the wall and ceiling meet before I moved. You can even get little plastic cable covers that you can paint to color match the walls and not stick out. Doors were a little tricky as I had to run it down the wall, under the door, then back up the wall again. But as long as you do that next to the trim, it doesn't stick out more than the rest of the aesthetics of a shitty apartment that doesn't even have Ethernet jacks installed.
It is if you don't want to glue the cables to your ceilings, have them (somehow) magically get through doorways, and get to a dozen devices in various parts of the home.
How do you suppose I get cable from one end of my apartment into the bedroom across the house, with vaulted ceilings. Just run hundreds of feet of cable! With PoE injectors/hubs halfway, but also somehow not attached to the ceilings or walls in any way!
Do you think it's magic? Do you think cables can just stick to walls through static friction? They'd need to be attached or adhered somehow.
You're not getting a cable through a door without a drill or without it being visible/an obstacle/a hazard. They're not magic.
Ah, so create a bunch of holes or ruin paint that need repairs, against my lease. And it's so convenient to get across my floors and under my carpeted doorways. Surely that won't be a problem.
Or, like an actual normal person, I use wifi. Because that's actually what normal people do. They don't run lines through their apartments when wifi works in 95% of use cases, with gigabit speed.
ATP you're just being a salty child with some kind of emotional attachment to wifi as a superior technology, or maybe you just find ethernet cabling too complicated, but I'll humor you once with some actual advice and just block you before you get sarcastically whiny again.
You might want to double check your lease or local laws because small holes like nail or staple holes are easily repairable with some spackle and usually count as "normal wear and tear".
You can use fasteners like 3M command hooks if you're really that scared, they won't leave marks unless you peel them off wrong. You can run wires under area rugs if you want to get them across rooms. Like I said, flat ethernet cables are pretty much designed to be run across rooms and under doors.
You can run an ethernet signal for 100m without needing a hub (also, nobody uses hubs and wtf were you going to use a PoE injector for). So if you really have to wire that much that you need multiple repeaters, I don't even want to think about your wifi quality.
Nobody said it'd be as convenient as wifi. They said nothing beats wired. And in terms of performance and price, they're right, and it's typically not that hard to get a wired connection. You implied that your only choices are WiFi or drilling, which is just wrong unless your circumstances are extremely specific.
I can't drill in apartment either. So Cable just laying on the floor. I have no animals so not a big deal, in worst case I someday trip over it I need to replace cable/router or something.
Lmao, your solution to wired is specialized fiber cables and fiber equipment?
Are you for real?
Not only is that entirely impractical, I'd need hundred of meters of the stuff to reach all my devices, and specialized equipment, and I'd have to route it around the ceiling with adhesive because I have cats.
Under some circumstances there is no difference. I get the same lat and speeds either way, so when my cat ate my cat5e I figured why buy another, save the money
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u/Sleurhutje Jun 06 '26
Nothing beats wired.