Your Gaming PC Has A Bottleneck! - YouTube

- Do you know what your last PC upgrade,

complete waste of money, why?

'Cause it's not about nanometers, it's not about Giga Hertz,

it's bottlenecks, the bottlenecks are going to eat them all.

They don't want you to know about this because the truth is

every PC has a bottleneck, more than one.

I mean, you could upgrade and upgrade

and upgrade and get nothing.

Haven't you been reading between the lines?

The cron sheeple, just look, look!

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(Electronic Dance Music)

A lot of you out there are probably

perfectly happy with your PC.

You built it and now you're gaming, working

or streaming away with minimal hiccups.

But what about those of you who crave unlimited power?

Well, for an enthusiast, it can be absolutely devastating

to finish a rig only to realize that one key part

is holding back the performance of all of the others.

If only you'd spent a little bit more or alternatively

if only you'd saved a bunch of money on the rest of it,

or is it really that straightforward?

In our most thorough investigation into system bottlenecks

to date, we took three games, three CPU's

and four graphics cards and put them on our test bench.

First up one of our favorite games for showcasing

smooth scaling across both CPU and GPU

shadowed the Tomb Raider at 1080p.

Well as it turns out, when you're low end consumer graphics

card can only get you about 17 FPS at high settings, you're

really not going to get a big boost from upgrading your CPU.

In our case, the core i5-9,600k actually

performed worse than the core i3-8,100

and then the 9,900k hardly made any difference at all.

Now upgrading to a 1050 Ti doubles our view RAM

from two gigs to four and gives us a faster GPU, and yet

we still don't see any major improvement from a better CPU.

As you can see from the next graph however, the second we

swapped for something beefier like an RTX 2060

with six gigs of I-RAM and more than

double the CUDA cores, we're off to the races.

Now, there isn't a huge gap between our six core i5 and our

eight core i9 but the performance gains for moving to a CPU

that's both significantly faster and has an extra two cores,

and two threads is a staggering 18% gain in terms of FPS.

What's even more interesting,

is that when we upgrade to an RTX 3070,

we see almost zero gain on our poor little quad core i3.

So maybe it actually doesn't matter if you can't get

your hands on a 3070, because for a lot of you out there,

there won't be much of an improvement if any.

As you can see though, with our higher end processors,

the gap does widen as the core i9

starts to leave the i5 in the dust.

Now this is a perfect illustration of why reviewers

configure their test benches the way they do.

We've been criticized many times over the years for using

let's say an extreme edition processor

in a review of a mid-range graphics card.

And it usually goes a little something like

WTF are you guys doing?

Nobody buys a $300 GPU and a $1000 CPU.

And that's a fair point, sure but the thing is reviews live

online indefinitely and a faster CPU will eventually come.

We might even review them, get subscribed by the way.

And the thing is by alleviating these bottlenecks

proactively using the best hardware we can get our hands on,

we get a much clearer picture of the true capabilities of

that graphics card even if it might take a little while

for a mid-range gaming tower to realize them.

One of the other things you've probably noticed is that

reviewers tend to benchmark games at different resolutions,

depending on what's being tested.

CPU reviews tend to focus on 1080p numbers while GPU reviews

can include performance data for 1440p, 4k and beyond.

Let's look at why.

On the same setup at 4k, yeah look at this graph.

When both the 1030 and 1050 Ti are asked to render

such a high fidelity scene, they end up

so bogged down that any CPU can keep up with them.

Even the 2060 hardly cares which CPU it's paired with.

And as for the 3070, while it certainly gains a few frames

from higher end processing power, really it isn't

gaining anywhere close to what it was at 1080p.

So at the end of the day at either resolution you have to

ask yourself, is it really worth spending almost double

the money on your CPU to eke out just a few more FPS?

Is a bottleneck really all that bad?

Well it can be.

Some programs inherently load

certain components differently, take CSGO.

CSGO is a game so it needs a good graphics card or whatever.

But the thing is, it's an older game that was tuned

for professional gameers to run it at very high frame rates

on previous generation graphics cards.

So as you can see from our benchmarks,

if you were to read on the internet that CSGO is so CPU

bottle-necked and then run out and buy a shiny new CPU,

you might end up sorely disappointed.

That is until you also upgrade your graphics card.

This quad core 3.6 gigahertz manage i3 manages very

solid frame rates with our 2060, but then look at this

stepping up to an i5 straight up doubles that performance.

That's right, double!

Don't you love it when your CPU does that?

Show it some love by rocking a processor t-shirt

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Finally, step up to a 3070, and spending

even more money starts to look like an okay idea.

Our 9,900 lead gets even longer when it's paired with a

powerhouse of a graphics card like this one, gaining over

50 FPS while our core i5 lags behind with an increase

that could be described as benchmark margin of error.

This illustrates why the suite of applications

used to evaluate a product is so important.

We've taken flack, again many times for including

games that no one plays, instead of just

testing the most popular titles on Twitch.

But the reason we do it that way is to demonstrate how

different types of games might run on a new product.

The thing is we don't need the exact FPS of every single

E-sports game to know that if it gets 250 FPS in Dota two,

it's probably going to run League of Legends okay.

We also want to know how it holds

up in a more visuals focused game, right?

Of course, while our testing focused on gaming today,

bottlenecks occur in all types of computing processes

and operating system for example,

can limit your file transfer speeds.

You take the same computer throw Linux on it

and all of a sudden, boom, you're copying files faster.

Your onboard network port might not fully utilize your ISP's

new two gigabit service or your CPU might be sitting there

with absolutely nothing to do while you're opening up a

program, because your hard drive is struggling to deliver

it any data that it needs to work.

Thermals can also be a silent bottleneck.

Taking a system that normally runs fine

and then throttling it down under heavy workloads.

And then there's scientific computing.

That's an area where unlike gaming, you might need hundreds

of gigabytes or even terabytes of system memory

in order to keep an extreme multi-core processor

like an AMD Thread Ripper or Epic fed with data.

Speaking of lots of cores, do you need more for gaming?

Well, the answer is yes, but only to a point.

While modern games have been moving in that direction

since the last generation of home consoles included eight

core CPU's there's just a limit to how much can be done in

parallel in a game because the work of one core is so often

dependent on work that another core hasn't yet completed.

So while it's notorious for performing best on a 16 core

Ryzenine 5950 X our Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

tests didn't actually see as much of an improvement in terms

of FPS, as you might think after we

moved from a respectably powerful quad core.

So in many cases, the performance gains that you see

on a chart where the higher core count one outperforms the

lower core count one really come down to the manufacturer,

tuning the turbos of the individual cores so that

those higher end ones turbo up to higher speeds.

On AMD at least this is something you might be able to

overcome on your own with basic software like Onesmus'

Clock Tuner for Ryzen, so there you have it.

The answer to the age old question of what do I upgrade

first CPU or graphics card is, it depends.

That's because if you think about it every system has a

bottleneck because if it didn't have a bottleneck,

the performance would just keep going to the moon.

And the crazy part is those bottlenecks shift around

depending on what you're doing

and how the rest of the system is configured.

That's where the title came from.

And that's one of the main reasons it's so important to look

at multiple reviews when you're considering spending money

on a gaming PC, 'cause no one can test every workload

with every combination of hardware, while also considering

every upgrade path that may or may not be available to you.

But one thing you probably won't need to

upgrade is your power supply.

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They've got units that have 12 year freaking warranties.

So clearly there's a great degree of confidence in the

product that it's going to last you like three to four

upgrade cycles of the rest of their gear.

And they've also got a bunch of unique products, too.

If you want a quiet build

you can go for one of their fanless options.

If you need something for an all white build like the one we

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And the bottom line is man, Seasonic just makes good stuff.

So go check them out at the link in the video description.

Thanks again, Seasonic for sponsoring this video

and guys let us know what other kinds

of bottlenecks would you like us to explore in the future?

Leave a comment and then maybe take a look at some of the

best 240 Hertz gaming monitors that we've been looking at.

So you can make sure you're not missing

out on all those FPSs is your system's making

after you upgrade the rest of your hardware.