Is Your Gaming Rig Being Bottlenecked??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,215 words · ~6 min read
0:00
hmm what's the perfect CPU for this build
0:06
ooh this looks pretty good now i just need a graphics card to pair
0:10
it with right hmm
0:13
well this looks too pinner this is probably going to bottleneck my CPU
0:20
but then this huh this is probably over the top it might
0:25
like destroy it just to be in close proximity to it
0:29
but i mean how do you keep from bottlenecking your
0:35
CPU with your GPU and then do you have to worry about picking the
0:39
right CPU for the GPU can it work both ways
0:43
what does a balanced build even look like these days
0:48
good thing we've got all the tools to find out
1:00
when i say bottleneck what comes to your mind is it super laggy unplayable frame
1:05
rates and games is it waiting five minutes just to load
1:09
Windows is it the neck of a bottle
1:13
whatever your exact experience with bottlenecks is they all have one thing
1:17
in common like a five lane highway merging before
1:21
a single lane tunnel one aspect of your computer system will
1:25
be holding back another one keeping it from reaching its full
1:29
performance potential so
1:33
bottlenecking has become one of the most common fears among new pc builders i
1:38
mean after all no one likes wasting money so are these
1:42
concerns legit or has bottlenecking
1:46
become some sort of boogeyman for system builders to deter new users from
1:52
configuring their own we were actually inspired to make this video by the
1:57
incredible bottlenecking that we experienced when
2:01
we tried to game on this right here a 64
2:05
core xeon phi system but
2:08
that was obviously an unrealistic scenario i mean this CPU is made up of
2:14
64 like crappy atom processors
2:18
so today's investigation will test just
2:21
how badly we can bottleneck a more normal system built from actual desktop
2:27
components so in front of me here is a
2:31
lower end current gen CPU a popular but pretty obsolete CPU from
2:37
2013 and a high-end current generation
2:42
processor we're going to start then with the most basic of our graphics cards a
2:47
gtx 1030. this will help us establish a
2:50
baseline now i'm actually expecting
2:54
similar performance in games going all the way from a mid-tier processor from
3:00
five years ago all the way up to the brand new one
3:05
that would indicate a GPU bottleneck
3:08
where it's holding back our better CPU
3:12
and success i guess
3:16
because we're basically even across the board surprisingly cs go actually runs
3:21
really well on this card averaging over 120 FPS for all of our benches but
3:26
what's less surprising is the way that in a gaming workload an underpowered
3:31
graphics card will perform its best
3:35
pretty much regardless of which CPU it gets paired with so you heard it here
3:39
first folks a processor upgrade will do nothing for
3:43
your gaming experience if your GPU can't
3:47
keep up with that said 3d creation software
3:51
blender reveals a difference between our platforms demonstrating that whether a
3:56
system is bottlenecked or not is heavily dependent
4:01
on the type of work you plan to do on it
4:06
now then let's retest everything with a gtx 1060
4:12
and see how the situation changes
4:16
right away we're greeted with oh good a
4:19
difference so the core i7 pulls way ahead in
4:23
assassin's creed origins and cs go and
4:27
3dmark confirms this data with a much nicer spread between our platforms which
4:32
means then that our more powerful processors are getting to stretch their
4:37
legs a little more because they're not being held back to the same degree but
4:42
wait it appears as though the gtx 1060 is
4:47
still the bottleneck for deus ex and far
4:50
cry 5. this is where our second lesson about
4:54
bottlenecks comes in it can even be dependent on the
4:58
individual piece of software with some
5:01
games favoring faster cpus and others
5:05
needing more GPU horsepower in order to
5:08
look their best coming back around then to our non-gaming tests the results
5:13
confirmed that productivity still likes a fast CPU to keep the GPU fed
5:19
who knew okay then so that's probably quite
5:22
enough of these uh blue collar gpus where the devil is the titan v
5:27
james
5:31
james is running something on the titan v right now so we're going to use this
5:35
titan v box this gtx 1070 and this gold
5:38
sharpie marker to create a reasonable facsimile of a titan v
5:46
here we're expecting some pretty different results and
5:50
yes we have finally broken the GPU
5:54
bottleneck on deus ex and our ryzen 3 is
5:59
definitely beating out the fx 6350 for
6:02
the first time in far cry 5 showing us
6:05
what an optimized title can do unfortunately blender still doesn't run
6:10
on the titan v so we're just left with v-ray which doesn't scale
6:15
bringing us to our last test scenario
6:19
dropping our monitor's resolution
6:22
down to 1280 times 1024
6:26
on that very same titan v
6:31
test platform and oh what's this
6:36
interesting even with a titan v
6:40
we're back to CPU bottlenecking
6:43
ah yes the final lesson is that bottlenecks
6:48
will also appear and disappear depending
6:52
on the settings that you're using in your program
6:56
lower resolution gaming is easier on the
7:00
graphics card but actually doesn't ease
7:03
the CPU's job to nearly the same degree
7:07
and higher resolution gaming is harder
7:10
on the graphics card but since that drives the frame rates lower the CPU
7:16
doesn't end up having to work as hard so if your gaming system was severely
7:22
CPU bottlenecked you actually might be able to upgrade your monitor and play at
7:28
a higher resolution without losing any FPS
7:32
go figure so really the main takeaway here
7:37
is that there is no way
7:41
to avoid bottlenecks all together
7:44
think about it a theoretical system with no bottlenecks
7:49
would have unlimited performance in every workload
7:54
because nothing would be a limiting factor obviously that's ridiculous
7:59
something is always going to hold you back and you can't get
8:03
paralyzed by the bottleneck boogeyman
8:07
as you've seen here as long as you apply some common sense to your config and
8:12
avoid pairing thirty dollar cpus with
8:16
three thousand dollar graphics cards you should be just fine and you can always
8:22
ask for advice like maybe over on the Linus tech tips forum about where the
8:27
bottleneck might be in your system and how severe it might be
8:32
just make sure to provide some information about what you expect to use
8:36
your pc for and what kind of settings
8:39
you expect to run at or as you can see it's going to be pretty
8:45
hard to help you so thanks for watching guys if this
8:48
video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that
8:52
like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is
8:57
our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum
9:00
which you should definitely join so you can get bottleneck advice