Question Can an ethernet cable cause input delay/delay in general ?

dannym213

Commendable
Sep 10, 2021
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1,510
I have good hardware - i5 14600kf, rtx 3060, 16gb 3200mhz ddr4, but i play 900p low settings and it still feels super delayed in game, I have an 8+ years old ethernet cable and it doesn't even say what CAT type it is, so would an upgrade be worth it?
 
Not very likely. A common number they use is 2/3 the speed of light for copper wire. So if you really want you can calculate the delay if you know the length of your cable. It is some value in nano seconds.

A bad ethernet cable you would get data loss which is different to delay. You could ping your router and see if you get any lost packets. It tends to be rather rare.

You might as well buy a new ethernet cable it is always nice to have a extra one around just to test. You do not need anything expensive or fancy. All you need is cat5e. This will run 1gbit to 100 meters. No other cables will run faster or better even if you spend lots of money on it. The key thing though is to get a quality cable. You need pure copper cable with wire size 22-24. Make sure you see those specs. There is a massive amount of that flat cable sold that has wire much too thin to be certified as ethernet. BUT even flat cables will not "delay" traffic they just a lot of times will not work or will only run 100mbps rather than 1gbit.

The ethenet cable will in general never cause any kind of network delay. If you get data loss lag spikes in games not something like input delay.