Published May 10, 2026, 8:02 AM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.  Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. A few years ago, I decided to sort through the box of Ethernet cables I'd accumulated over the years. There were patch cables from old routers, a couple I'd crimped myself, and a handful of cheap ones that came bundled with various devices. They all looked fine from the outside, but about a third of them failed the test.…