Steam slow downloads on a 10Gbps connection

[xXtiburonXx]

Hi! First things first, I apologise for my poor English. I'll try to explain my problem with Steam downloads as clearly as possible.

I live in Spain and a couple of days ago, I upgraded my internet connection from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps because I delete and install a lot of games through Steam and wanted to speed things up a bit.

The problem is that my downloads peak at 1.1 Gbps, but then drop dramatically to 300–400 Mbps after a couple of seconds. Sometimes they drop to 0.0.

Speedtest shows speeds between 3,500 and 4,000 Mbps, but I can't figure out how to get these speeds on Steam.

I bought a TP-Link TX401 10GB Ethernet Card and a Cat.8 Ethernet cable. I have an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-core processor at 3.8 GHz, a Toshiba TR200 SSD and an external WD_Black P40 Game Drive (I'm listing all of this to address a possible bottleneck problem).

I'm really lost, and I might have wasted money because I didn't realise how rare it is to have this internet speed. I literally couldn't find a single tutorial or post about this anywhere, only a Linus Tech Tips video which I didn't understand at all.

So, any ideas?

P.S. Yes, I deleted the Steam download cache, changed the servers to the closest one in my area and tried many other workarounds with zero results.

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Whatever the theoretical speed your connection could achieve it will always be physically limited to the physical attributes of your own PC. The connection thru Steam servers could also be throttled directly by your ISP, especially in hours of high usage.

Add to this that Steam installer is several leagues more transparent than other normal installers. Instead of a simple line of progression Steam will show you what actually happen during the installation. If your drive is busy writing stuff and installing as you download (as it is usually the case) the you can monitor the situation in real time and you can easily see if the reason why it drop to zero is because your computer is busy with other stuff.

[pckirk]

does not mean your pc cpu / memory, or storage device can keep up those speeds. Steam downloads and decompresses at the same time, and stores the data in blocks, for install when completed.

[xXtiburonXx]

Yes, I think you're both right, and the problem is hardware limitations, because both the SSD and the NVME reach 99% usage when I'm downloading a game to one of them. I hadn't thought to check the performance in the task manager, and I think that's where the bottleneck is. I'll consider whether it's worth getting an SSD with faster write speeds or not. Thank you very much.

[PaulKrawitz]

Meanwhile, my German connection:

600 kb/s.

[xXtiburonXx]

Originally posted by PaulKrawitz:

Meanwhile, my German connection:

600 kb/s.

Been there, done that.

But honestly, this 10Gbps connection is a kind of "scam" because provider don't warn you about all the stuff you need to take properly advantage. But yes... is not a 600kb/s connection, obvs.

[Inhuf]

Speed tests, some games and other places on my PC that I download games, I get more than 10 Mbps. What is going on with either Steam for multiple games or specific games? I have 1Gbps wired and pulling that easily with other things on my PC. I mean, some games, like right now, they are fully stopped downloading and just sitting at 12%.

[NakiBest]

ISP issue usually, in 99% of cases.

Slow downloads due to slow HDD/SSD possible, but rare.

(More common - slow downloads due to HDD/SSD defect, or near defect condition.
Such as no bad sectors yet but some slow ones for HDDs, or SSD about go to "Boom!!"/etc.

Slows speeds may happen also with perfectly fine HDDs/SSDs but motherboard with defect instead.)