I have a Intel gigabit nic in my workstation (replaced my broadcom on board nic because it was unstable at gigabit speeds under FreeBSD 10.1) it was under $25 dollars. Have cat6 cable connecting it to my routers gigabit port. Can't says I see a difference in using cat5 or cat6 but when I was troubleshooting the on board nic I got the cable to rule that out.
I do a lot of torrent downloading and I connecting to work via a VPN and I can see a real difference in performance with gigabit speed.
Doesn't everything for home now (at least in the 3 or 4 years) come with gigabit support?
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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick
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