CAT 5 cable question

Same type of cable, only the wires goto different pins on the connector at the end.

Normally a "straight" cable will be used to plug your network card (NIC) into a hub/network switch/router etc

A "Cross-over" cable is normally used when you want to plug 2 devices directly together (without using a hub/switch/router), i.e connecting 2 pcs together directly....or a xbox/xbox360 directly to the NIC card on your machine. A cross-over cable can not normally be used to connect a PC to a hub/switch/router, unless its on the uplink port (normally the last port)
 
Crossover cables are used to connect "like devices" they are still Cat5.

Cat5 is a data integrity standard which means basically it can carry data over ethernet without error for 100m at 100Mbit under normal circumstances.

Crossover cables are now pretty defunkt as most switches have autosensing uplinks and most NICs can also autosense.
 
A lot of network cards will now do the switching over internally, so a patch cable will work with them too.
 
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