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On 1 Gig package but only get 70 mbps download speed.

Geo2
Tuning in

Hey all,

As the title says, a few months ago I upgraded my package to Gig1 Volt speed boost, but everytime I download a large file, or a game from Steam, I max out at 70 mbps. I've done various online speed tests which state my speeds are around 1 gig, I've checked my PC connection status which also says 1 gig speed.

I called Virgin Media customer services who did all the tests and said the speeds were good, they asked how old my PC was, I said around 10 years old. They said the problem could be that I have an old network card, so I looked online and purchased a TP-Link Gigabit PCi Express Network Adapter, installed it and I still get 70 mpbs download speed.

I did a bit more research online and read that another problem could be the ethernet cable being old, so I purchased a cat6 ethernet cable and used that with TP-Link Gigabit PCi adapter, and I still get 70 mbps max download speed.

I'm completely lost now and have no idea what to do.

17 REPLIES 17

Adduxi
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

Do a wired speed test on this site.  Run the FULL tests and post the results.

www.samknows.com/realspeed

 

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more

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SaltKing
Tuning in

Hey

You will be limited by your HDD write speed, to make full use of the speeds, you will need decent M2 (no sata) drives.

For reference, I get

140mb on my M2 NVME drive

70mb on my Sata SSD

35mb on my old mech HDD

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, here are the results from the speed test.

1.jpg

Hi SaltKing,

Thanks for the response, I'm not too tech savvy so I'm not sure what to look for, here are some specs from my PC.

Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB
ST2000DM001-1ER164 Standard disk drive (1.82 TB)
Intel Core i7-5930K CPU @ 3.50GHz
Rampage V Extreme Motherboard (Rev 1.xx)
16 GB RAM

The drive is a old style mechanical drive- that's the best you will get out of it.

Hang on, 70Mbps is only 8.75MB/s.

Hard drives, even 10 year old ones, should be capable of 10x that.

OP can you check CPU usage when downloading as unpacking has to occur when downloading on Steam.

Download plus decompression hits HDD bad

---------------------------------------------------------------

The CPU usage fluctuates, but it averages around 50%.


@Geo2 wrote:

The CPU usage fluctuates, but it averages around 50%.


And what sort of read/write speeds are we looking at for the hard drive?

At 50% CPU at 70Mbps it doesn't sound like you are going see anywhere near Gig1 speeds regardless.