600MB/s Steam download over 10Gbps Sonic fiber link 

I'll see what I can do! This is the fastest game I've found to download over steam so far, but I can show other ones that are still impressive. I'll go do Diablo 4, but let me know if you have any "requests". Some are painfully slow, no fault of my machine or internet. Some companies just don't pay to host at download fast speeds.

@@davidthomson7706yeah I noticed like I work for a distributor and some times emergency movies are sent to me however maximum download speed is 100 mbps while downloading 184 gb movie but my internet speed is 3gb/s. One person sent through Frame I/0 and I got 1.5g/s and it took 19 min to download 194 gb file .

I just uploaded a video of downloading an 80GB video file from a server across the world in 2 min. It maxes at out at 8Gbps and stays right around 7Gbps for the majority of the download. It's crazy hard to set things up to transfer this fast though. Gotta love that Sonic is making my machine be the limiting factor and not my internet speed!

Seriously? What internet service do you have? That's only 4x a dial-up modem's speed!

You must be from USA right?

Yeah sorry, I guess I need educate myself a bit outside of my bubble here. Where do you live that 200Kb/s (not 200KB/s) is a standard download speed? Just curious.

​@@davidthomson7706 Here in indonesia 200kb/s for a download is considered very normal, because the price of 4g and 5g are just too much for people to use them regularly. Same thing with WiFI(s), it's safe to say only 2 out of 10 internet users use wifi instead of mobile internet. I downloaded more than a terabyte with 100-250kb/s until about 6 years ago, when i got my first wifi setup. Even now i'm only running with 2.4mb/s download but hey i'm grateful.

Half an hour for 1 GB is 582 KiloBytes/second. 1 GB at 200 KiloBytes/second takes 1 hour and 27 minutes.

Just remember that you will always be bottlenecked by the slowest piece. I couldn't find a good 10G router, so I built one in a microatx case using Intel 10G ethernet adapters an a Ryzen 5500 CPU/mobo. I then found that my main gaming PC (not router) was bottlenecked by its RAM of all things and eventually upgraded RAM and CPU too. I already had a fast SSD that could keep up. Even once I could get 8Gbps consistently on a browser with speedtest.net, I only rarely download a game that has this kind of speed. It definitely varies by game or game dev - not all steam games download at the same speed, as you'll see. Either way, good luck with Sonic, they're awesome! I do benefit from this speed transferring to/from my feralhosting server. It took a lot of tweaking but I can now get 7Gbps solid from halfway across the world!

@@davidthomson7706 this is a massive amount of information which I'm very grateful for, thank you! The router tip is huge, I'm making plans for switches and got myself Nvme drives. And wow! I didn't know feralhosting had that much bandwidth. The upload will be nice to my 1gig self hosted appbox though. Also in case I need to go down the custom router path(scary!), what router os did you use, or what do you think is easiest?

Ubiquiti dream machine SE, it has a SFP+ port (get a module for whatever connection type required) which will do 10g, and it has a 2.5g Ethernet port, both on the WAN side. It also has an SFP+ port for the LAN side so you can do true 10g to your internal network. I have sonic 1g now, gonna give them a call about 10g! It’s not like I need it, but I want it! Crazy!

@@davidthomson7706 anddd we finally got it! We needed something very reliable so a ROG Rapture AXE-16000 was purchased. I see speeds around 4gbps on the built-in speedtest from the router, and am using a gigabit network card and switch (for now).

I've found that the bandwidth is not based on the name of the assigned steam server as much as it seems to be dependent on the game being downloaded. Try the game I downloaded in this video. Also, I didn't get any better than you with my previous AT&T 2.5Gbps fiber line.

Need Steam Cache server linustechtips did video on it.

Same :(

What I found through a lot of testing, is you need at least this to get 4-5Gbps from my Steam test: - 4 cores - Dual Channel (important) RAM at >= 3000Mhz - a fast internet router (built my own so I could do filtering and ad blocking at full speed) - disk with at least 2X the speed you download at (it's doing reads and write at the same time, not just writing) - good CAT6 cables (or fiber) There was a ton of other little tweaks in the OS and in Steam, but I don't remember them all..

So far, that's as fast as Steam has been able to support in my tests. It's really hard to saturate a 10GbE connection - the bottleneck is usually something else. Given Steam downloads are extremely processor and SSD intensive, I'm surprised I even got this fast. It's not just downloading a file. It's downloading, decrypting, writing to disk, decompressing, and installing the game simultaneously. When it says "done", the game is actually ready to be played! The fact that I had to buy faster RAM to even hit these speeds shows how hard it is to handle data coming in this fast.

Sonic is my ISP. $30 a month total. Crazy cheap.

​@@davidthomson7706wow, so u dont pay any additional fees per month for using their fiber cables and stuff? Or only in total ur paying 30$ no additional fees for ur fiber cables and stuff? Its crazy expensive in our contry, we have to pay the fees of using their fiber cables per month.(its ~ $30-40 per month). Plus the max speed here is 300 mbps with 600 gb data cap (its $250 per month) so in total we would be paying ~ $300 per month for fiber cables + our isp. 😂

​@@davidthomson7706sorry for bothering you. But how much did you pay for equipment? And the installation fees?

Both installation and the ONT is free. You can pay to rent a router from them, or you can bring your own router. Also to clarify, the total cost is $60/mo ($50/mo for the first 12 months). There’s a US federal subsidy of $30/mo for any internet plan if your income is low enough. I assume that’s why they’re paying $30/mo.

@paulokalaydjian5131 I didn't pay for any equipment. I signed up early, about 8 months before they had even run fiber to my neighborhood, so I got in at $30 before they'd even set final pricing at $50 per month. Not only is it cheap, but they'll pay up to $200 in early termination fees to your current ISP! I'm not getting a subsidy, just got in early. Also, it's not $60 a month unless you also want a phone line with it. I pay $30 total every month, nothing else! If you live in my neighborhood and sign up today, it'd be $50 per month. That's it! It's not introductory pricing. You can check for yourself at sonic.com.

What I've determined is that there is no "one speed" for Steam. The speeds between games are huge, which makes me think that the publisher of the game either pays for hosting themselves, pays for faster speeds, or the Steam caching of common files at faster nodes is the cause. Still, my machine was DEFINITELY the limiting factor for a while, and I kept having to upgrade stuff until I got these speeds. If you're using Windows, you can use the graph view in the task manager to see which resource is maxed out while do a Steam download. For me it was first CPU (ended up being RAM speed), then SSD, then network router (which is why I built my own).

:) I just posted an even faster video of an 80GB torrent transfer instead of a Steam game download. 700-800MB/s average speed!! Still bonkers to me..

I only have 2 devices that can benefit from 10Gbps speed, so I built my router to have three 10GbE ethernet jacks. That means that I don't need a 10GbE switch in addition to my router box. The rest of the house, including my WiFi, uses 2.5GbE switches which are all very similar and pretty cheap, or 1GbE switches. The alternative would have been to run 10Gbe through the whole house and use an expensive, hot, and "high electric bill" 10GbE switch, which would have been silly for devices that couldn't even connect at those speeds. I feel validated in building my 10GbE setup, despite people saying anything over 1GbE is pointless. I think this video proves this, along with my experience doing >4Gbps parallel downloads of large AI models from HuggingFace, and using pget in lftp to download web files fast by splitting them up into lots of parallel chunks you can download simultaneously.

That's blazing fast. I cherry-picked the fastest game I could find. 300MB/s is more common than 600MB/s for me.

Great question! It's actually 2 pieces that need to be upgraded: - add 10GbE ethernet adapter - buy or build 10GbE router The reason #2 is needed is because a typical 1GbE switch or router will limit the speed to 1Gbps, even if you have 10GbE internet and a 10GbE port on your computer.

That's a good idea, but I did monitor my NVMe busy times and tested max write speed (>2GB/s) to make sure I wasn't limited by my SSD. 650MB/s was as fast as I could get from Steam, which I think is the limit of my Sonic internet as my speedtest.net speed test results (which don't have any disk writes) are about the same speed. So, my link can't actually hit 10Gbps capacity to my house, but I can't complain. :)

Thanks actually a really good question. I don't use anything but BATTLENET and Steam though, so I'd have to sign up and buy stuff on the others to see. I will say that from my previous testing, the 2 biggest limiting factors to speed (now that my machine isn't one) is how busy the internet is in general (i.e. peak times of day) and the speed of the specific hosting repository. For example, it's really clear that Steam isn't all the same speed. I picked this game to show off the speed as it's the fastest publisher on Steam - if you download other games on Steam, the speeds change dramatically.

@@davidthomson7706 And also Steam uses lots of cpu power.

As you can see in this video, downloading a game quickly is a major benefit. I also really notice it when downloading Stable Diffusion or other AI models from huggingface.com. Those are often 4-5GB a piece. Some tool installs have to download multiple models as part of setup, which makes it really nice when you have >1Gbps.

San Francisco I think

Yes, it's actually real! My internet and my machine are fast enough that I can actually notice some interesting things. For example, the download speed of different games on Steam varies a lot. I specifically chose this game for the test as it seemed to be one of the fastest games to download. I always thought all Steam games were downloded from the same Steam servers and would go just as fast as each other. This is very much not true! Another surprisingly fast service is the machine learning model repo "huggingface." I can usually download a full 5GB model file from there in the same time it takes me to create a new directory and select it as the download destination (10-15s)!

​​​@@davidthomson7706other thing you can do is change the steam download server location to west Africa since it doesn't seem to get overloaded like the north American and European ones. For me it brought my download speeds from around 80 Mbps to 130+ Mbps although I don't think it will help much for you since you seem to be pretty close to a SSD write speed limit.

10Gbps is SUPER rare in the USA and is very expensive when available. Sonic Internet is just a crazy cool company you should read up on. I just happen to be lucky enough to live where they're based in California. Sadly, they have an uphill battle as the other ISPs, like AT&T are trying to kill them off so they stop spoiling their ability to charge a lot of money for fast speeds. Watch my other video where I catch an AT&T guy going door to door trying to convert people back to slower speeds and higher prices using fear and misinformation..

70%.

Yeah, and the CPU usage seems to be about half decompressing the game data as it's downloaded and the other half is just what it takes to handle that amount of incoming data through the OS.

Took me 2 months after getting my 10Gbe internet before I was able to get these speeds. Took so much work.. This will be easy in the future, but it's still the early days of 10Gbps internet and most things aren't set up for it (OS, motherboard, network protocols, hosting services, home routers, command line utilities, etc). Only Steam and large file transfers from super-fast services even come close to maxing it out.