you know what your last pc upgrade complete waste of money
why because it's not about nanometers it's
not about gigahertz it's bottlenecks the bottlenecks are
gonna 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 can upgrade and upgrade and
upgrade and get nothing haven't you been reading between the
lines the come on sheeple just look look
look at our sponsor see sonic has got
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the video description
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
well power 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 cpus 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 shadow of the tomb raider at
1080p well as it turns out when your 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 9600k actually performed worse than
the core i3 8100 and then the 9900k
hardly made any difference at all now upgrading to a 1050 ti doubles our
vram from 2 gigs to 4 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 swap for something
beefier like an rtx 2060 with six gigs of vram 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 from 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
thousand dollar 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 the bottleneck really
all that bad well it can be some programs inherently
load certain components differently take cs go cs go is a game
cs goes game so it needs a good graphics card or
whatever but the thing is it's an older game that was tuned for professional
gamers 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 cs go is so CPU bottlenecked 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 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 or CPU pillow from
ltdstore.com finally step up to a 30-70
and spending even more money starts to look like an okay idea our 9900s 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 flak
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 esports game to know that if it gets 250 FPS in dota 2 it's
probably gonna 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 an 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 2 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 threadripper or epic fed with data
speaking of lots of course 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 cpus 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 ryzen 9 5950x
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 one us mrs clock tuner verizon 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 because 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 seasonic power supplies are built with the future in
mind they've got everything in their lineup up to 1300 watt 80 plus platinum
power supplies 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 one that we just put together they've
got you covered there too and the bottom line is man c sonic just makes good
stuff so go check them out at the link in the video description thanks again
see sonic 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 240hz gaming monitors that we've been
looking at so you can make sure you're not missing out on all those FPS's your
system's making after you upgrade the rest of your hardware