Rundown of bottlenecking

[Lukeyshot]

Introduction

 

Recently I have seen many threads on here saying "I have a i7-6700k, 32gb DDR4 ram and 2 GTX 1080ti's but the gpu's are only using %58 but when I test them on their own they get %98-99 is it my PSU that is not providing enough power??" Well on that post out of 54 comments not a one said it could be a bottlenecking issue (Which it is) they all recommended taking the psu back and getting a bigger one... When instead of spending £250 on a new 1200w psu think about upgrading the cpu or just removing one of the 1080ti's, if you have the money to get 2 £700 cards then you have enough to buy a £300 i7-8700k to reduce the amount of bottlenecking (Not saying it will completely remove bottlenecking to do that you would need a higher end CPU like a Threadripper or i9-7940x but it will significantly reduce it to allow better performance)... It is sad to see that ammature PC builders throw all their money into GPU's thinking that is what gives better performance and blow all their budget on 2 things.

 

I have made a recent discovery on the internet (I am willing to say some of you may of heard of this website) It is a website built to check specs and see if there is any bottlenecking before you even buy the parts, I have used this one upwards of 10 of my builds for customers and never once got a complaint that the PC was bottlenecking all because of a simple website. I recommend to anyone new to building PC's from scratch to use this website to calculate and see if there will be any problems before buying - http://thebottlenecker.com/calculator

 

 What is bottlenecking

 

Bottleneck is a kind of hardware limitation in your computer. A bottleneck occurs when the capacity of an application or a computer system is severely limited by a single component. Components that often bottleneck are graphic card, processor and HDD. Bottlenecks affect microprocessor performance by slowing down the flow of information back and forth from the CPU and the memory. If all of the components of a system are not able to feed the same amount of data at the same speed, a delay is created.

 

How to find a bottleneck

 

UserBenchmark ( Home - UserBenchmark ) is a website devoted to comparing various models of hardware to see how they perform in the user's computer.  In addition to that, if you allow their benchmarking tool to run on your computer, it will spit out areas where you can upgrade components in effort to increase performance.  But wait it gets better.  Rather than simply saying "Hey you have a 7200RPM HDD, upgrade to an SDD", it give you ideas of upgrade parts and how they would perform based on the benchmarks from other users.

Now you can argue that the results can be skewed by users who are over-clocking, but to that I'll say, keep in mind over-clocking doesn't give huge performance boosts.  On average it's less than 5%.  On top of that it's easy to look at a graph and say "OK the top 30 benchmarks are likely from over-clockers, just as the lower 30 likely have faulty or problematic hardware. 
But for an idea of what you should upgrade/replace, check out UserBenchmark and run their benchmark tool and let it give you an idea of where you are likely to encounter bottlenecks and so on. 

 

Signs of bottlenecking

 

General observations I have made:

• If you are hitting your resolution, frame rate, graphic settings goals then do not worry! Quit reading this post and go play!
• You want your GPU to be working at 99% utilization. This means you are getting what you paid for. This means the bottleneck is your GPU (good thing!!!)
• During gaming: If your CPU utilization is at 99-100% and your GPU utilization is "low" (50% - 80%) then your CPU is bottle necking your system.
• If neither CPU or GPU utilization is very high, that means the game you're running is not demanding. Either turn up the graphic settings or find a new game to test with.
• A high (120Hz, 144Hz) frame rate on CPU intensive games will generally require a "modern" i7 or an overclocked i5 perhaps (example: BF1)
• A high resolution (1440p, 4K) will more easily place the bottleneck on your GPU.
• 16 is the new 8 GB of RAM. 8 GB doesn't seem to be cutting it in high end AAA games anymore. For example when playing BF1 with only Steam and Discord (desktop version) open I see RAM usage of just over 8 GB (I have 16 available on my system). If this is the case then you may be bottle necking at your RAM in these titles. If you have the budget I highly recommend going with 16 GB.
• If you have a 144Hz monitor and are experiencing a CPU bottleneck, limiting your frame rate to a lower value will help make it smoother with less dramatic frame drops. This can be done with MSI Afterburner/Riva Tuner Statistics (link below)

 

Thank you if you took the time to read this, I just wanted to put all the information into one place instead of running in circles around google trying to find answers... This Is just a basic rundown of what bottlenecking is and what to look out for if you think your system is bottlenecked

 

Luke

 

**UPDATE** I have been working with the guys over at 'TheBottlenecker' and now it is a lot better and has individual generations of CPU's and GPU's... It now includes the new flagship RTX 2000 series cards and the new i9 processors

 

**Please note that it only contains one of the Xeon E7 range CPU's due to it being one of the most common Xeons to be used in consumer grade builds - They will most likely add the 28 core beast of a CPU the Xeon Platinum 8176 for those crazy people who want to build a pc with one or two of them in It *cough* Linus *cough* how's that going by the way been a month since we had an update - I digress but the Calculator is always getting updated and if you want to request any features such as a GHz selection for CPU's or GPU's I'm sure if you gave them enough requests they will look into it**

 

[Firewrath9]

Imo you cant calculate a bottleneck, it all depends on the game, for example, a 8400 and a 1080 might be cpu limited in some games but in very gpu intensive games, it might not be bottlenecked at all.

 

also site doesnt have 8th gen intel.

[Firewrath9]

Also UBM is meh, it doesnt have different listings for 8gb and 4 gb 580 which is annoying or the different types of 560. The prices all link to ebay so those are not accurate.

[Lukeyshot]

I know you can't calculate the amount of bottle neck it just gives you approximation of how much your pc will bottleneck in general, Triple A games will bottle neck if you are using two different generations of components.

 

Like the example given someone bought a i7-6700k and two GTX 1080ti's and they were bottle necking due to the CPU reaching max useage before the GPU's and the whole point of this was to make people aware that the proformance doesn't come from the GPU alone but in assistance from the CPU

[Lukeyshot]

On ‎12‎/‎08‎/‎2018 at 11:51 AM, Firewrath9 said:

Imo you cant calculate a bottleneck, it all depends on the game, for example, a 8400 and a 1080 might be cpu limited in some games but in very gpu intensive games, it might not be bottlenecked at all.

 

also site doesnt have 8th gen intel.

I got in contact with the owners and asked them to add the 8th gen intel CPU's and within 24hrs they were added  

 

They said they are going to work on adding as many consumer grade CPU's and Commercial CPU's as possible

 

(Lists on all of them are in Alphabetical order and not in generation order so you might have to have a look through to find the CPU/GPU you need)

[Firewrath9]

2 minutes ago, Lukeyshot said:

I got in contact with the owners and asked them to add the 8th gen intel CPU's and withing 24hrs they were added  

M trying it but i have a 5ghz 8600k, which is almost a 40% overclock. They only go to 130%.

[Lukeyshot]

13 minutes ago, Firewrath9 said:

M trying it but i have a 5ghz 8600k, which is almost a 40% overclock. They only go to 130%.

What you are saying is going to be imposible to manage, so many people have so many different over clocks it is not even funny... To add a setting for every 0.1ghz would not only be a waste of time but stupid in general, just take what you are given... I will contact them again and see if they can add another drop down box for GHz on the cpu but the answer will most likely be no as it would take too much time and with a quick google you can find what your CPU will preform at with your 1070

 

If you are not experiencing any of the symptoms stated above then you don't have to worry... Open Task Manager when running heaven benchmark and see if your CPU and GPU are running at 80% to 99% then it is fine but if it is under 80% you might want to dial down the overclock to about 4.5 and see how it behaves

 

Plus what temps do you run at when CPU is under load... a 5GHz overclock on a AIO is unusual, you must run about 60-70 under load? you are running a 143% overclock not many people will go that high 4GHz being the max in most case scenarios

[Firewrath9]

11 minutes ago, Lukeyshot said:

What you are saying is going to be imposible to manage, so many people have so many different over clocks it is not even funny... To add a setting for every 0.1ghz would not only be a waste of time but stupid in general, just take what you are given... I will contact them again and see if they can add another drop down box for GHz on the cpu but the answer will most likely be no as it would take too much time and with a quick google you can find what your CPU will preform at with your 1070

 

If you are not experiencing any of the symptoms stated above then you don't have to worry... Open Task Manager when running heaven benchmark and see if your CPU and GPU are running at 80% to 99% then it is fine but if it is under 80% you might want to dial down the overclock to about 4.5 and see how it behaves

 

Plus what temps do you run at when CPU is under load... a 5GHz overclock on a AIO is unusual, you must run about 60-70 under load? you are running a 143% overclock not many people will go that high 4GHz being the max in most case scenarios

Yeah, i run usually 60-70c, bear in mind that i use kryonaut, my house is 70f

and push pull with SP140s on the 280mm asetek AIO. Planning to delid soon in preperation for the new gpus.

note that it is not always 5ghz, it ramps down to 3 when not doing anything,

 

[PrinnyExplodes]

But what if my GPU and CPU are both at 40-50% load in games !! Can it be.....my rgb fans are bottlenecking my system? 

[Lukeyshot]

12 hours ago, PrinnyExplodes said:

But what if my GPU and CPU are both at 40-50% load in games !! Can it be.....my rgb fans are bottlenecking my system? 

Haha