
In a similar vein, your current server location may be experiencing high traffic or a hardware issue that is throttling speeds, especially during peak times such as the evening. Altering the server location on your PC can improve speeds considerably as the downloaded data has to travel shorter distances. Steam servers are scattered around the planet to provide users with the best download speeds possible.

Similarly to a leaden browser that can benefit from emptying the cache, you can do very much the same with Steam and resolve most download speed problems. Steam is now configured to download at the maximum speed provided by your particular internet connection.


If Steam is competing with other programs such as torrent utilities and software updates for precious bandwidth, speeds can be drastically affected, slowing down to a trickle in some cases.
