Best way to determine a bottleneck

[dedjester]

Whats the best way to determine my greatest bottleneck in my current system for gaming and performance? Is there a program? ie. Replacing X component will increase frame rates (or some other obligatory method of measuring) by X amount. Also is there an overclock that can produce similar results?

 

[Outlander_04]

no

but if you list your specs there are people posting here who can give you insights into how to improve your computer

 

[hunter315]

Bottlenecks are very difficult to predict theoretically and have to be found experimentally. Every system has a bottleneck, the idea is just the minimize the performance hit from the bottleneck and make sure that it doesnt degrade performance below the desired level(generally 40-60FPS in games)

 

[KidHorn]

You can start by running Task manager and clicking on the performance tab. If the cores are consistently running below 50%, your CPU probably isn't a bottleneck. If you have free memory, RAM probably isn't a bottleneck. Anything that hits your HD a lot will almost certainly be a bottleneck, but most games won't do this. There's not much you can do about that other than getting a sold state drive. If everything looks good and your game runs sluggishly, the problem is likely your video card.