Every PC has a Bottleneck - But Why?

Bottleneck is something that every gamer is worried about and it’s been like this for ages. You might have built your PC and it seems to be working just fine, it does pretty good in terms of gaming, streaming and all sorts of other boring stuff.

But some of us want our PCs to work in the best way possible without any hiccups during the workload. It can be quite frustrating for someone who builds his PC from ground up only to realize that there is one key component in the PC that is holding every other component back from achieving its true power! And that literally is the definition of a bottleneck, in case you didn’t know.

Bottlenecks can be a gamer’s worst nightmare as they make you want to upgrade that “part” of the PC that might be causing them only to realize that it isn’t as straightforward as you made it out to be. So how exactly does a bottleneck work and how does it cap your PCs performance? Let me help you figure it out:

 

How Does it Work?

It turns out bottlenecks are extremely common in most of the builds or even all of the builds, if we just follow the concept of how a bottleneck works. So, for someone who is new to all this, a bottleneck is basically something that occurs when some part of your PC is potentially holding back other parts of your system.

For instance, if you have built your PC with a high-end graphics card with the hopes of running Apex Legends, let alone Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra high settings while keeping your CPU considerably lower. What happens is your CPU starts to cap your GPU’s performance and while you get considerably better graphics in the game, the FPS doesn’t seem to remain consistent. You end up getting your game lagging most of the time, which is way worse than playing the game at low settings.

Bottlenecks don’t only occur in gaming but they come in all sizes and shapes across many computing processes. For example, an operating system can slow down file transfers, but if you put Linux on the same computer, you'll notice that you're copying files faster right away.

Alternatively, your CPU might be doing nothing while you're opening a program because your hard drive is struggling to provide the data it requires to function. Then there are these simulation and scientific processes that, unlike gaming, need hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of system memory to keep an extreme multi-core processor supplied with data in this area.

 

How to fix Bottleneck

Bottleneck is something that will always be there, but surely there are ways that you decrease the bottleneck now that we know what it is and how it works. So, the answer to your question of what I need to upgrade in my pc to get rid of the bottleneck is, it depends. That's because every system has a bottleneck, and the crazy part is that those bottlenecks shift depending on what you're doing and how the rest of the system is set up.

And that's also one of the main reasons why reading several reviews is so important when buying a gaming PC: no one can test every workload with every combination of hardware while also considering every upgrade path that could or might not be available to you.