Steam: How to set a Download Speed limit

Steam Banner image with many game titles

Steam is a great platform filled with games, but sometimes you might need that broadband for something else, so a download speed limit can help.

How to set a download speed limit in Steam

As you’ve probably guessed, the first step is to have Steam open. You’ll struggle to achieve much of anything without that to start with.

From there, you’ll want to tap the Steam button in the top left of the screen, and select Settings to open the menu you’ll need.

Navigate to Steam settings
Credit: Steam

The settings window will look a lot like the one shown below, although your individual settings may be different. To see this screen you’ll have to select the Downloads tab on the left-hand side.

When you’re in the downloads screen as shown here, you should tick the limit bandwidth to option, and then enter a KB/s value into the box before hitting apply, and then close the menu.

Settings to Downloads, enter new value and tick the box
Credit: Steam

Just to help out those who aren’t entirely familiar 1MB/s is 1024 KB/s. Here are some example speeds you might want to limit to.

  • 256KB/s – 1/4 of a MB/s
  • 512KB/s – 1/2 of a MB/s
  • 1024KB/s – 1MB/s
  • 4096KB/s – 4MB/s
  • 10240KB/s – 10MB/s

If you’re not familiar with your own internet speed, you might want to ask other people in your household or search up an internet speed test – though if you’re the only one using the internet in the house at the moment, the fastest way to check can be done in Steam itself. Simply start a Steam download and see how high the download speed reaches and what it typically stays at.

If nothing else is competing with Steam for the connection speed, odds are it’ll end up displaying a fairly accurate reading of your total speed, and then you can pick a lower value to limit it accordingly and let you do something else without interruption.

And just to be on the safe side, /s means per second in this context. It is not an indicator of sarcasm, as you might see on some subreddits.

Steam Download speed limit successfully created
Credit: Steam

If you’ve done it correctly, you should have a small snippet of text as shown here with a highlighting box, stating your current Steam download speed limit below the current download and maximum download rate stats. This information can be found on the downloads page, which you can find easily by clicking the “Downloading” text at the bottom of Steam at any given moment a download is running.

Anything else to mention?

This has been another pretty short guide for Steam. While I imagine most people figured this out on their own, it’s worth mentioning for people who are either too busy to play around with Steam Settings to find it, or people who need an answer for how to set a download speed limit on Steam immediately.

That’s it on this one, if you’d like more guides you can find them in our tech guides and gaming guides sections right here on The Click.

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