How To Fix Your Steam Deck Download Speeds

Released on February 25, 2022, the Steam Deck is Valve's latest – and and favorably reviewed – effort to establish itself in the gaming hardware market. Like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, the release of the handheld was marred by supply issues and preorders regularly took several months to fulfill. Fortunately, the problem has since been fixed and preorders are no longer required, making the Deck finally way easier to get.

As the Steam Deck has become more widely available, it's made its way into the hands of those who eager to tinker and find out what it's capable of. The Steam Deck comes ready for gaming right out of the box, but some of its more tech-savvy users have discovered ways to truly get the most out of the handheld — with some gamers even figuring out how to change the default start animation for the handheld and create their own. Recently, one of those users took to Reddit to reveal a method for dramatically improving download speeds. After a bit of reconfiguring in the settings, anyone can enjoy this unlocked potential.

Here's how to make the download speeds on the Steam Deck even faster.

Reddit user Gawdamn69 posted the multi-step solution on the site sometime in the middle of November. The result, they said, bumped their speeds up from just 20 megabits per second to 650. They added that their internet plan allows up to a gigabit per second, so the speed increase will vary from person to person.

To start, press the "Steam" button and go to the settings. From there, select "Downloads," and in the "Limit Bandwidth" field, set the value to 100,000 (the Reddit user says the number doesn't matter as long as it's over 1,000). Then, hold the power button and switch to the desktop. Click on the Wi-Fi symbol in the bottom right corner. In the top right corner of the tab that appears, select the symbol on the left to access Wi-Fi settings. In the new window that pops up, look on the right for a field titled "BSSID." Select the only option in the dropdown menu. Do the same in the "Restrict to device" field below that. Next, look toward the top of the window for the "IPv4" tab. Click on it, and in the "Other DNS Servers" field, type "8.8.8.8." Select "Apply" at the bottom of the screen and restart the Deck.

If that doesn't immediately work, go back to the Steam settings. Under "System," enable Developer Mode and turn off Wi-Fi power management. From there, players should be able to start downloading at higher speeds.