Question any advice on steam download speed being slow

adast

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so i just today received another broadband that i switched from talktalk to EE higher 67mb/s fibre
but i see no changes on steam download sits at the same speed maximum it reach 5.1 is this normal ? i was expecting at least to bump to 9MB/s
in my previous place i had ee broadband which was 37mb/s and my steam download was going max at 10mb/s
i tried some changing regions but no luck still the same
is there any other way ?
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adast

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Can you mention how you're tethered to your ISP? Might be a good idea to check and see if your motherboard/platform is pending any BIOS updates.
how can i check my motherboard is pending BIOS update i never updated motherboard BIOS not sure how to do it
and what you mean by tethered to my ISP ?
 

adast

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Does the speedtest site show the proper speeds or is only steam that does not run correctly
The speed test shows properly it shows around 40mb/s as it said it’s an 67mb/s fibre broadband and in info they said average I will be getting 40mb/s I know I will not get full download speed but sitting at 5 download speed should be a bit more then that it only steam does that and I don’t know what to do is it my computer or something or what
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
Not sure if this is related but it could be the PC slowing down the process too.
The patches are delta files. They basically tell steam "hey go look at this part of the file and change these bits". Rather than "here is the entire file again, even though we added like 1 digit at the end of the file"

This allows the download itself to e much smaller.

The down side is that locally it uses more CPU and disk to process these files. It essentially

  1. Gets a list of 'changes' it needs ot make from the patch file
  2. reads the entire original file
  3. processes what parts need changing
  4. writes out the new file with the changes

This process is both CPU and disk intensive. I have a 1GBps connection but I can only realistically get 400mbps off Steam. This is mainly due to the high compression of the files so basically my CPU is capping out how fast I can really download games from steam not my overall connection. With a fast enough CPU and an SSD drive I can get better speeds closer to my 1GBPs connection.
 
I suspect you are confusing MBYTES and Mbits.

Speedtest since it is a network test always uses Mbits. File transfers like steam tend to use MBYTES. 40mbit is more or less 5MBYTE so your results are very consistent.

If the ISP said 40mbps is what you are expected to get even on a so called 67mbps connection then your numbers are doing exactly what is expected.
 

adast

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I suspect you are confusing MBYTES and Mbits.

Speedtest since it is a network test always uses Mbits. File transfers like steam tend to use MBYTES. 40mbit is more or less 5MBYTE so your results are very consistent.

If the ISP said 40mbps is what you are expected to get even on a so called 67mbps connection then your numbers are doing exactly what is expected.
yeah but its weird in my last previous house i had broadband ee with 37mb/s and i used to get at least 10mb/s download speed on steam but that was with different pc system i had before used to download games faster with 37mb/s then having now the fibre 67mb/s
 

adast

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Not sure if this is related but it could be the PC slowing down the process too ?

so you saying it could be down to cpu and ssd this is my pc
i had older system before and in my previous home i had broadband with 37mb/s
and i had way higher steam download at 10mb/s and now i got higher one 67mb/s fibre and its lower download speed
Intel Core i5 10400 @ 2.90GHz
16.0GB ram corsair
MAG B460M BAZOOKA
RTX 3060
931GB SanDisk SSD PLUS 1000GB (SATA (SSD))
931GB TOSHIBA
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
it would only be a reason if previous CPU was faster or more capable than current one.

it can cap download speed if CPU is busy working on the file instructions. I don't know process well enough to know if steam starts actioning the files before they have completed downloading.

how can i check my motherboard is pending BIOS update i never updated motherboard BIOS not sure how to do it
you can see what Bios version you have now by looking in system Information app, on the line next to Bios Version/Date

As you never updated before, its probably not version 7C83vA4 which came out in October.
MSI show you how to update

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-B460M-BAZOOKA/support
 
yeah but its weird in my last previous house i had broadband ee with 37mb/s and i used to get at least 10mb/s download speed on steam but that was with different pc system i had before used to download games faster with 37mb/s then having now the fibre 67mb/s
You must be reading something wrong.

a byte is always 8 bits so you if you were getting 10MBYTE download speeds you have to have at least 80Mbit internet speed. And this is ignoring some overhead so it is never exact.