im learning about bottle neck

[budy86]

Hello,

Im relatively new to getting to know as much as i can about all the ins and outs about computers, mainly to do with gaming and OC CPU's. Nver tried OC a GPU tho.
I read up heaps on OC and i tried it out for myself, but later realised you need at least 1333mhz RAM. (dont quote me if thats still wrong)
Anyway, so can someone please explain what is bottle necking? how can you fix it? what causes it? and how do you tell if its doing so?
Thx very much

 

[kajabla]

Bottlenecking is not an error, something broken that can be fixed. It's just the name for the universal situation in which one component of a system holds the rest of it up by being slower. An easy-to-visualize analogy is an assembly line: if each part can be attached to a car in ten seconds, the car proceeds along the line normally. If one person is responsible for sewing on every seat cushion, though, and they take twenty seconds to do it, the whole line backs up. To avoid a mess of unfinished cars, every other station, which could put a car through in ten seconds, must slow down to the rate of one action every twenty seconds.

An example of a bad PC bottleneck would be a 2600K/GTX 570 build with 1gb of RAM. The processor and graphics card would be forced to sit practically idle, waiting on the data that should be provided by more RAM.

Bottlenecking can only be "fixed" (it can never really be eliminated; you can only minimize it) by smart part choices. Ideally, disregarding upgrade paths (though those are important), a PC should have parts that all reach their limit at around the same point. It can be detected by people with experience, who know what parts have relatively similar levels of performance.

 

[budy86]

Ah ok, so in simple terms, 'you can only go fast as the slowest person in ur group' so to speak, obviously it all depends on, well everything.

 

[kajabla]

Yep. Weakest link. The source of the bottleneck may depend on the use, though. Media stuff (Maya) will take more CPU power, for instance, than a game.

 

[budy86]

ah k,, thanks heaps

 

[4745454b]

There is a guy on here who claims that only a CPU or GPU can bottleneck. He believes that this is what the term means. I even showed him a link where the term originally has to do with networks and the slower part. I think the term has correctly expanded into what Kajabla correctly described. A bottleneck is simply whatever your slowest part is.

 

[budy86]

Yea honestly at first i thought it was to do with gpu's or something. BUt thanks for the info

 

[kajabla]

In games, the GPU is usually the part that bottlenecks, except in old systems where people try to throw a beastly new GPU in with some junk CPU.