Optimize Your Upgrades

Identify bottlenecks and break through into pro-grade benchmarking

- Zak Storey

COMPUTERS ARE funny things: a complicated collection of components, each working in conjunction with the rest to produce on-demand output. But as with any team effort, there is always a weak link in the chain.

As more and more people join the PC enthusiast community, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype, and upgrade a very basic system with high-end componentry. And while that’s not always a bad thing, it can lead to those weak links being stretched to breaking point, as top-end hardware makes its way into a system that wasn’t designed to host it.

This can lead to bottle necking, when one piece of hardware doesn’t perform as well as it should, due to another component in the system being ill-equipped to handle the potential performance levels. As with the neck of a bottle, only so much can come through at once, so the power that’s ready to be tapped is unused. It’s usually easy to spot the part that is under performing GPU, CPU, or RAID setup—but identifying which component is causing the bottleneck can be more difficult.

So, which are the most common problem parts? How do you identify them? And how do you break through that barrier? Read on to find out….

Integral System Parts

The most common cause of bottle necking is your platform and processor

CPU

Bottle necking is typically down to your processor. Your CPU processes everything from rendered in-game frames to memory storage requests, complex program processes, and more. It’s an intricate part of the puzzle, and the easiest to become overwhelmed in any system.

Most common bottlenecks, especially in games, are due to the processor not being fast enough to handle all the data and processes thrown at it at any given time.