0 What Is Bottleneck / How to Avoid?

Before we start talking about bottleneck in computer, let's start with what the term "bottleneck" means.

A bottleneck is when the performance of a system is blocked / limited by a single component of the system.

To relate this to computers, a bottleneck is when one of your parts (CPU, GPU, RAM, Hard drive) are holding the rest of the computer back since they aren't performing good enough to keep up with the other parts of your computer.

In daily life conditions, hard drives are the components which mostly cause bottlenecks. For example when you are copying a file, no matter how fast your CPU is and no matter how much RAM you have, you are limited with your hard drive's writing speed, thus limiting your copying speed to that. The same logic applies to any piece of software you are starting up at the time.

This being the case for years, nowadays there is a solution to prevent hard drive bottleneck. The SSD's seem to be a complete solution to hard drive bottleneck since they offer -really- high speeds compared to typical hard drives. That being said, you shouldn't use your old 7200 RPM HDD with a brand new system you just gathered, since you would bottleneck your system pretty hard with that old hard drive.

Of course, as everything, the SSDs come with downsides as well. First things first, they offer really small storage space, and to add another thing up to that, they are quite expensive even though they offer small storage. Still, I believe it's a logical to move to buy a SSD if you are gathering a new computer up. Using your old hard drives wouldn't be the best option for a brand new computer.

In gaming conditions, your problem won't ever be hard drive bottleneck. (After the game is 'loaded', hard drive goes out of the way, so only slow loading could be a hard drive bottleneck, and nothing else.) Instead, it will either be GPU or CPU bottleneck. Either your CPU will bring your GPU down, or your GPU will bring your CPU down, and you'll end up with low frame rates in both cases.

There's a way to understand if the problem is your CPU or GPU (RAM is rarely the case unless you have -really- low memory). You can start checking the frame rates from low resolution and keep going higher one by one. The CPU load doesn't change by resolution but the GPU load changes since the GPU has to render more and more pixels every time you raise the resolution.

So, if your frame rates are dropping as you increase resolution, the problem is with your GPU.

If your frame rates are constantly low and it doesn't change even when you lower the resolution to give your GPU more space, then the problem is with your CPU.

You can always overclock your CPU or GPU if you don't want to change the parts in your system, and try to make them work optimally with eachother. If that doesn't solve your problems, then I'm afraid you'll have to change your CPU or GPU depending on the problem you are experiencing.