None of my longish Cat5 cables would work at 1GB/s. Adhering to this image found on Wikipedia, cables that maxed at 100MB/s now dance at 1GB/s, wahoo!:
The order of the wires is very important. Of course I learned about twisted pairs in high-school. I just assumed that like colors go together in pairs, but it is not the case for Cat5 at least.
Hopefully this helps you peeps having the same frustration. It is also worth pointing out that Cat5e is fine for 1GB/s and is a documented IEEE standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable Ignore those attention grabbing phonies who say you should have used Cat6
