hmm what's the perfect CPU for this build
ooh this looks pretty good now i just need a graphics card to pair
it with right hmm
well this looks too pinner this is probably going to bottleneck my CPU
but then this huh this is probably over the top it might
like destroy it just to be in close proximity to it
but i mean how do you keep from bottlenecking your
CPU with your GPU and then do you have to worry about picking the
right CPU for the GPU can it work both ways
what does a balanced build even look like these days
good thing we've got all the tools to find out
when i say bottleneck what comes to your mind is it super laggy unplayable frame
rates and games is it waiting five minutes just to load
Windows is it the neck of a bottle
whatever your exact experience with bottlenecks is they all have one thing
in common like a five lane highway merging before
a single lane tunnel one aspect of your computer system will
be holding back another one keeping it from reaching its full
performance potential so
bottlenecking has become one of the most common fears among new pc builders i
mean after all no one likes wasting money so are these
concerns legit or has bottlenecking
become some sort of boogeyman for system builders to deter new users from
configuring their own we were actually inspired to make this video by the
incredible bottlenecking that we experienced when
we tried to game on this right here a 64
core xeon phi system but
that was obviously an unrealistic scenario i mean this CPU is made up of
64 like crappy atom processors
so today's investigation will test just
how badly we can bottleneck a more normal system built from actual desktop
components so in front of me here is a
lower end current gen CPU a popular but pretty obsolete CPU from
2013 and a high-end current generation
processor we're going to start then with the most basic of our graphics cards a
gtx 1030. this will help us establish a
baseline now i'm actually expecting
similar performance in games going all the way from a mid-tier processor from
five years ago all the way up to the brand new one
that would indicate a GPU bottleneck
where it's holding back our better CPU
and success i guess
because we're basically even across the board surprisingly cs go actually runs
really well on this card averaging over 120 FPS for all of our benches but
what's less surprising is the way that in a gaming workload an underpowered
graphics card will perform its best
pretty much regardless of which CPU it gets paired with so you heard it here
first folks a processor upgrade will do nothing for
your gaming experience if your GPU can't
keep up with that said 3d creation software
blender reveals a difference between our platforms demonstrating that whether a
system is bottlenecked or not is heavily dependent
on the type of work you plan to do on it
now then let's retest everything with a gtx 1060
and see how the situation changes
right away we're greeted with oh good a
difference so the core i7 pulls way ahead in
assassin's creed origins and cs go and
3dmark confirms this data with a much nicer spread between our platforms which
means then that our more powerful processors are getting to stretch their
legs a little more because they're not being held back to the same degree but
wait it appears as though the gtx 1060 is
still the bottleneck for deus ex and far
cry 5. this is where our second lesson about
bottlenecks comes in it can even be dependent on the
individual piece of software with some
games favoring faster cpus and others
needing more GPU horsepower in order to
look their best coming back around then to our non-gaming tests the results
confirmed that productivity still likes a fast CPU to keep the GPU fed
who knew okay then so that's probably quite
enough of these uh blue collar gpus where the devil is the titan v
james
james is running something on the titan v right now so we're going to use this
titan v box this gtx 1070 and this gold
sharpie marker to create a reasonable facsimile of a titan v
here we're expecting some pretty different results and
yes we have finally broken the GPU
bottleneck on deus ex and our ryzen 3 is
definitely beating out the fx 6350 for
the first time in far cry 5 showing us
what an optimized title can do unfortunately blender still doesn't run
on the titan v so we're just left with v-ray which doesn't scale
bringing us to our last test scenario
dropping our monitor's resolution
down to 1280 times 1024
on that very same titan v
test platform and oh what's this
interesting even with a titan v
we're back to CPU bottlenecking
ah yes the final lesson is that bottlenecks
will also appear and disappear depending
on the settings that you're using in your program
lower resolution gaming is easier on the
graphics card but actually doesn't ease
the CPU's job to nearly the same degree
and higher resolution gaming is harder
on the graphics card but since that drives the frame rates lower the CPU
doesn't end up having to work as hard so if your gaming system was severely
CPU bottlenecked you actually might be able to upgrade your monitor and play at
a higher resolution without losing any FPS
go figure so really the main takeaway here
is that there is no way
to avoid bottlenecks all together
think about it a theoretical system with no bottlenecks
would have unlimited performance in every workload
because nothing would be a limiting factor obviously that's ridiculous
something is always going to hold you back and you can't get
paralyzed by the bottleneck boogeyman
as you've seen here as long as you apply some common sense to your config and
avoid pairing thirty dollar cpus with
three thousand dollar graphics cards you should be just fine and you can always
ask for advice like maybe over on the Linus tech tips forum about where the
bottleneck might be in your system and how severe it might be
just make sure to provide some information about what you expect to use
your pc for and what kind of settings
you expect to run at or as you can see it's going to be pretty
hard to help you so thanks for watching guys if this
video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that
like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is
our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum
which you should definitely join so you can get bottleneck advice