See what your Windows network stack is really doing — then change it safely, or not at all.
Inventory, gaming diagnostics and reversible NIC tuning in one native app.

Gallery · Features · Safety · Getting started · Compatibility reports · Build

Warning

SockTuner is a community alpha, not production software. Read-only inventory and diagnostics are the main surface. Tuning is experimental and changes live network settings: applying a NIC property restarts that adapter and briefly drops its link, so never apply a change through the connection being changed. Every write needs consent and elevation, and is snapshotted, verified, audited and reversible.

Gallery

Dashboard — inventory at a glance and a health check that opens the section that fixes each finding	Gaming diagnostics — judge an endpoint against your game's tick rate, then re-run to see if a change helped
Tuning plan — only what the driver advertises, with current, default, accepted values and risk	DNS resolvers — benchmark any resolver over UDP 53, then apply or restore DHCP
Interrupt affinity — which CPUs service each device's interrupts, and MSI state	Preferences — live changes stay off until you turn them on

_{Screenshots from a real machine; private addresses are blanked out.}

Who it is for

Tweakers, technicians, competitive players, system integrators and power users who want one place to inspect and control the Windows networking stack, network adapters and NIC driver settings.

It is not a "make my ping lower" button. Network settings depend on the workload, driver, OS and topology: disabling RSS, ECN, auto-tuning, offloads or interrupt moderation is not universally better, Nagle changes only affect TCP while most games use UDP, and no client-side setting replaces router-side SQM for bufferbloat. SockTuner shows the evidence and the trade-off, and leaves the call to you.

Features

Area	What you get
Inventory	Adapters, routes, interfaces, DNS, network profiles, bindings, NIC counters, TCP templates and globals, QoS policies, offloads, interrupts, Winsock catalog, driver identity and every driver-advertised NDIS property — read natively, no third-party tools
Gaming diagnostics	One check walks the path layer by layer (PC/NIC, LAN or Wi-Fi, router, access link, ISP, route, server) with latency, loss and jitter percentiles, DNS and TCP timing, path MTU, route quality and a playability verdict against the game's tick rate
Wi-Fi diagnostics	Passive WLAN data from the Windows cache — signal, rate, band, nearby channel pressure — without triggering a scan
Throughput & bufferbloat	Opt-in loaded-latency and throughput tests graded on the Waveform scale; external Waveform results can be imported and graded by the same code
DNS resolvers	Benchmark configured and extra resolvers, apply the fastest one or restore DHCP
Recommendations	Ranked, evidence-based suggestions sent to the tuning plan, plus router guidance where the fix is not on the PC
Tuning	Driver-advertised NIC properties, interface state and power, QoS policies and interrupt affinity, all through one allowlisted, reversible write path
Records	Versioned reports, local history, before/after comparison, trends, drift checks, continuous monitoring with a watchdog, and redacted exports
Languages	English, Español, Русский, 简体中文

How a change is applied

1. Pick an adapter and a focus preset. Only driver-advertised properties are listed, each with its current value, driver default, accepted values, risk level and trade-off.
2. Preview builds a dry run through a read-only store: current versus proposed, what rollback would restore, and the restart requirement.
3. Apply asks for the one-time alpha consent, then elevates. High-risk or experimental changes need APPLY typed to confirm, and so does any change made over a remote session.
4. The elevated worker re-reads the driver, refuses anything it no longer advertises or that drifted since the preview, writes, reads the value back, records an audit entry, then restarts the adapter and checks it returns to its previous link state.
5. Undo any audit entry to exactly the values it captured.

SockTuner never invents a value or a range, and any keyword it has not characterised on real hardware is treated as high risk.

Getting started

Requirements: Windows 10 22H2 or a supported Windows 11 release, x64. The release is a single self-contained executable: nothing to install, no .NET runtime needed.

1. Download the latest SockTuner-<version>-win-x64.zip from Releases and extract it.
2. Alpha builds are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn on first launch. Check the archive against the .sha256 file published next to it before running it.
3. Start SockTuner.exe as a normal user. It only reads until you accept the live-changes notice (shown at the first write, or from Preferences → Live network changes); each write then asks for elevation on its own.

Updates: Dashboard → Updates checks the stable or preview channel on GitHub Releases. Automatic installation verifies the SHA-256 checksum and requires both the installed app and the update to be signed by the same publisher, so it becomes available once releases are signed.

Help improve hardware compatibility

SockTuner exposes only settings the installed NIC driver actually advertises, so it needs reports from real hardware — especially Intel I219/I225/I226, Realtek RTL8111/RTL8125, Killer/Qualcomm, Broadcom and Marvell adapters, and any machine on Windows 10.

1. Refresh the inventory, then open Preferences → Help improve SockTuner.
2. Choose Create compatibility report, review the plain-text JSON, and let SockTuner open the GitHub issue form.
3. Attach the JSON file to the issue.

The report contains the adapter model, driver version, OS version, and driver-advertised keywords and constraints. It excludes current setting values, persistent adapter and PnP identifiers, MAC and IP addresses, routes, DNS servers, INF and user paths, machine name and exact timestamps. Creating it is read-only. The capability archive lists the hardware covered so far.

Building from source

Requires the .NET 10 SDK on Windows.

git clone https://github.com/PrimeBuild-pc/SockTuner.git
cd SockTuner
dotnet build SockTuner.sln
dotnet test SockTuner.sln
dotnet run --project src/SockTuner

Built with C#, WPF and the Fluent theme: a mature, native toolkit for a Windows-only administrative tool, with no browser runtime. Read the architecture for how inventory, diagnostics and the write path fit together.

License

MIT. Compatibility reports and bug reports are welcome through the GitHub issue forms; see SECURITY.md for reporting vulnerabilities.