This is how I managed to get my Steam downloads zooming along about 3x faster.
I love Steam. I didn’t always, because earlier versions were regularly cranky—at least with me—but in the last three years I’ve grown enormously fond of it.
First, because it allows me to register games whose discs are very nearly scratched to bits—the undersides look like an angry cat went to town on them. Second, because of Steam Workshop. If you’ve played any of the Elder Scrolls games (I’ve played Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim) you’ll know how much of a difference mods can make to the experience.
My only point of frustration hasn’t actually been with Steam in the recent past—it’s with my aggravating internet connection. I don’t game online, so I don’t have a LAN connection to my desktop. When I was using discs to install my games, it didn’t matter much, because I could let things patch in the background and the patches were never gigantic enough to be a problem.
Now, though, with my increasing tendency to make online purchases—because my games cabinet is stuffed to bursting—I needed to find a way to make Steam downloads faster. After some poking around online, here’s what I found.
Step 1
Visit http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/. You should see this:
Why does this matter? Well, regions of the map are clickable. So, you can click on different regions to look at server loads and see which servers have fewer users. Like so:
Vietnam, as the screenshot shows, has a 7.2 Mbps download rate and just 0.2% of the global Steam traffic. At the time of this writing, Russia had 11.4 Mbps and 9.3% of the traffic; the US had 16.6 Mbps and 20.1% of the traffic … the list goes on.
Step 2
Look through the regions and decide which server you want to connect to and download from. Your rule of thumb is moderate to high download speeds, with the lowest possible traffic percentage.
When I figured this out last night, the Czech Republic server had very little traffic (less than 1%) and decent download speeds.
Now, go back to Steam.
Step 3
a. In Steam, click View from the menu at the top.
b. From the drop down menu, click Settings.
You should see the Settings screen pop up.
c. On the Settings screen, click Downloads.
You should see this:
What we’re interested in is the Download Region section of the screen. Click the drop down arrow and take a look at the menu.
d. Remember that, in Step 2, we looked at the different regions and their server loads? Pick the one with the best speed and least load from the menu.
e. Click OK, at the bottom of the screen.
Steam will prompt you to restart for the changes to take effect and, once you’re back up and running, you should see a difference.
The results?
My download speed before I did this was peaking at about 200 Kbps. Speedtest.net told me that I have a 4.57 Mbps peak download capacity, so 200 Kbps was beyond ridiculous (just so you know, my router’s part of the problem, but I knew Steam could give me more).
After this, I went from about 200 Kbps to a peak of 639.7 Kbps (if you look at the background of some of the screenshots, you’ll see the numbers) and an estimated 7 day download was very nearly done when I left home for work.
I don’t know if you’ll see results this dramatic (a 3x speed boost is kinda nuts) but I do hope it gets you gaming faster. If it does or doesn’t work, do let me know in the comments—there might be more tips and tweaks out there that make help make this faster still.
Credits
There’s this wonderful article by Rizwan Anwer that went up 3 years ago which helped me do the stuff up there: http://wccftech.com/article/speed-steam-downloads-significantly/. Given that the Steam options have changed over the years, I decided to update the images and the instructions, so that it’s just as usable now.
If you have a problem with the instructions, drop a line in the comments. I’ll poke around Steam to see if this needs updating.
Happy gaming, folks!
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Thank you for this! I had a download that was supposed to last 3 days done in one night!
Most welcome! It’s been serving me well for a year or so now.
Thank you sooooo much!!!!
Most welcome. 🙂
4 hour game downloads now cut to 30 minutes !!!! thank you
Nope.. Not workin for me. But my steam download speed is 2.4 mb so I do not need it.
Do you know why it wasn’t working? If the process has changed, or if you ran into something unusual, I’d be happy to add a note to the article.
Then why are you here?
I have 274 mbps on speedtest.net LAN and i was getting 1.5 mbps which is insanely low so now i get 10 mbps thank you
speedtest.net displays in Mbps.. megabits per second… steam displays it in MBps… megabytes per second. this is why it looks like it is so slow, when really your right around what speed test is showing you.
I’m from the Czech republic… ._. This doesn’t help me xd
Connect to portugal
Worked great! went from an average of 1.8mbps in Australian servers, to 2.8mbps in New Zealand servers. Thanks.
Hoi. Check out Austria! Good connection, less traffic! Regards
the map doesnt show up
He was on a internet browser, look up in your search bar ‘steampowered.com’ and then login to ur account and go to the settings things.
woah, check out Ukraine
ANY BEST COUNTRY ?
holy shit look at south korea
Dude, I’m tellin’ you, all their servers are like, KACHOW!!!
So do you connect to the one with the highest PB?
It increased my download speed, but it increased the estimated time it would finish
Thats the same for me. Is there a fix. does it just not work or is it lying?
Mines doing that too, it’s saying 310 days, will it actually take that long ?
This still a problem? I’ve never encountered this before, but if people see it pop up often, I’ll do some digging and see if Steam’s acting weird or if something’s changed with how selecting a different region affects downloads.
thank you so much it was going more than a year sometimes but now it hasn’t said it once!
I don’t have settings on my steam please help me!
It worked thank you soo much!!!!!!
Happy to help. 🙂
MIne is becoming worse… I change the place to South Korea, WiFi says downloads at 15 MBps Upload 2.1MBps and then it runs at 59kbs now i switched to every single place they all run worse. Help please
Is it safe to say if I have an average speed of one megabite a second I won’t get a better speed anywhere else? I tried South Korea which had double the download speed average but I had the same speed as I did for America-Detroit.
it didnt worked for me im getting same speed as usual someone help i tried diffrent countries Im from India
this was so helpful!! thank you so much!!!! from 15 hours waiting to almost 1 hr!! so great!! 2 thumbs up!! cheers!!
it works i had a game from 12 hours and it dropped to 5 hours
*
insanely great! i was downloading just cause 3 (i started at about 10 AM) and at 5 PM it was only at 36%! when i tried this it did the other roughly 70% in only an hour! thanks!