I am a big advocate that quality cables are quality cables and you can get great performance out of nice-new cables. It's one of the least expensive "upgrades" one can do to a bike to help restore that "brand new" feeling/performance.

I personally don't like Gore cables. The idea of being sealed is nice but in reality people ride them too long and the teflon liner ends up gumming everything up. Enough to cause issues. I pulled some from a bike this weekend that I hadn't seen since installing the cables about a year ago. It was deplorable. Any possible "gain" that could have been made with them was destroyed by leaving them on too long.

I had another rider I was working with who I installed gore cables for because he "wanted the best". After running into shifting issues on his Cervelo with the routings required we just went back to normal Jagwire housing and inners and presto - perfrect performance.

I sourced and started buying Yokozun Reaction cables last year. After riding on them for about a year - yes they do markedly improve performance. This is mainly because of the high quality inners used, the lube they inject into the housing, and the stiff housings with extra wrapping (particularly the brake housing). I now recommend them for anyone running SRAM in particular. It's a modest "upcharge" from standard cables and can usually be found for the same or less than STI DA OEM cables.

PSIMET - Two Thumbs Up award.