0 CPU-Z & GPU-Z, CPU and graphics card overview software

CPU-Z and GPU-Z, two tools that every computer user should have no matter what since they give you a full overview of your CPU and GPU together. From clocks to temperature, these softwares give you every piece of information you need to know. CPU-Z also gives you the full information about your RAM if you ever need it.

Putting daily usage aside, they are great tools for overclockers since you can verify your data by checking the clock speeds on these softwares.

There isn't really much to say about these softwares as they are pretty straight forward, and they don't really give you the option of doing anything else other than showing you everything what's happening in your computer. (Be happy with that much!)

Maybe it's useless to mention this, but I have to say, these softwares take nearly no space at all as well, so you can feel free to install them on any computer you'd like to, you won't regret it.

I personally use both of these tools for years and I believe it's always handy to have small tools like this in your computer, so you can look up what's happening any time you want.

Click to download : GPU-Z | CPU-Z

2 GeForce GTX 690 vs. GeForce GTX 680 SLI

In one corner, the fastest single GPU card in the markets at the moment which is priced 500$, and in the other corner, nVidia's dual GK104 core GTX 690, priced 1000$.

It's the same price to buy either a 690, or a 680 SLI, but let's see which one performs better.

In the chart, we can see that GTX 690 is basically two GTX 680's on the same card. The core of 680 is doubled and placed on the 690. The only little difference between these two cards is that 690 has a higher GPU frequency as we can see above. Though, it's less power consuming to run a 690 than 680 SLI since 690 consumes a maximum of 300W power whereas 680 consumes 195W. Running SLI also means you'll need more cooling than running a single 690.

All being said, it's time to compare the performances of these cards. (Benchmarks taken from legitreviews.com)

As we see in the benchmarks, 680 SLI and 690 are very close to each other in every single one. It's no surprise to be honest, since both of the setups share nearly the exact values when we look at the charts. The difference between them isn't even close to be noticeable in a daily scenario. 

That being the case, I believe it would be more logical to buy a 690, since it's more open to upgrade when you have the money, (SLI 690) it's easy to cool, and it takes up less power. Even though the 680 SLI came in front in most of the benchmarks, we can see that the difference varies from 0.1 to 2 FPS maximum. Considering the advantages you get from buying a 690 compared to 680's small performance advantage, the good choice would be to buy a 690, especially if you are considering high resolutions. (2560x1600)

All in all, choosing either 680 SLI or 690 won't really make a difference at all, but you'd be saving some power and making an investment for the future by buying the 690.

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.