your gaming pc has a bottleneck

 - Do you know what your last PC upgrade, complete waste of money, why? 'Cause it's not about nanometers,it's not about Giga Hertz, it's bottlenecks, the bottlenecksare going to eat them all. They don't want you to knowabout this because the truth is every PC has a bottleneck, more than one. I mean, you could upgrade and upgrade and upgrade and get nothing. Haven't you been readingbetween the lines? The cron sheeple, just look, look! Look at our sponsor! Seasonic has got you coveredno matter what kind of system you're building and what kindof power supply you need. They've got up to 80plus titanium efficiency and warranties that gofor as long as 12 years. Go check them out at the linkin the video description. (Electronic Dance Music) A lot of you out there are probably perfectly happy with your PC.

You built it and nowyou're gaming, working or streaming away with minimal hiccups. But what about those of youwho crave unlimited power? Well, for an enthusiast, itcan be absolutely devastating to finish a rig only torealize that one key part is holding back the performanceof all of the others. If only you'd spent a littlebit more or alternatively if only you'd saved a bunchof money on the rest of it, or is it really that straightforward? In our most thorough investigationinto system bottlenecks to date, we took three games, three CPU's and four graphics cards andput them on our test bench. First up one of our favoritegames for showcasing smooth scaling across both CPU and GPU shadowed the Tomb Raider at 1080p. Well as it turns out, whenyou're low end consumer graphics card can only get you about 17FPS at high settings, you're really not going to get a bigboost from upgrading your CPU. In our case, the core i5-9,600k actually performed worse than the core i3-8,100 and then the 9,900k hardlymade any difference at all. Now upgrading to a 1050Ti doubles our view RAM from two gigs to four andgives us a faster GPU, and yet we still don't see any majorimprovement from a better CPU. As you can see from the nextgraph however, the second we swapped for somethingbeefier like an RTX 2060 with six gigs of I-RAM and more than double the CUDA cores,we're off to the races. Now, there isn't a huge gapbetween our six core i5 and our eight core i9 but the performancegains for moving to a CPU that's both significantly fasterand has an extra two cores, and two threads is a staggering18% gain in terms of FPS. What's even more interesting, is that when we upgrade to an RTX 3070, we see almost zero gain onour poor little quad core i3. So maybe it actually doesn'tmatter if you can't get your hands on a 3070, becausefor a lot of you out there, there won't be much ofan improvement if any. As you can see though, withour higher end processors, the gap does widen as the core i9 starts to leave the i5 in the dust. Now this is a perfectillustration of why reviewers configure their testbenches the way they do. We've been criticized manytimes over the years for using let's say an extreme edition processor in a review of a mid-range graphics card. And it usually goes alittle something like WTF are you guys doing? Nobody buys a $300 GPU and a $1000 CPU. And that's a fair point, surebut the thing is reviews live online indefinitely and afaster CPU will eventually come. We might even review them,get subscribed by the way. And the thing is byalleviating these bottlenecks proactively using the besthardware we can get our hands on, we get a much clearer pictureof the true capabilities of that graphics card even ifit might take a little while for a mid-range gamingtower to realize them. One of the other things you'veprobably noticed is that reviewers tend to benchmarkgames at different resolutions, depending on what's being tested. CPU reviews tend to focus on1080p numbers while GPU reviews can include performance datafor 1440p, 4k and beyond. Let's look at why. On the same setup at 4k,yeah look at this graph. When both the 1030 and1050 Ti are asked to render such a high fidelity scene, they end up so bogged down that anyCPU can keep up with them. Even the 2060 hardly careswhich CPU it's paired with. And as for the 3070, while itcertainly gains a few frames from higher end processingpower, really it isn't gaining anywhere closeto what it was at 1080p. So at the end of the day ateither resolution you have to ask yourself, is it reallyworth spending almost double the money on your CPU toeke out just a few more FPS? Is a bottleneck really all that bad? Well it can be. Some programs inherently load certain components differently, take CSGO. CSGO is a game so it needs agood graphics card or whatever. But the thing is, it's anolder game that was tuned for professional gameers torun it at very high frame rates on previous generation graphics cards. So as you can see from our benchmarks, if you were to read on theinternet that CSGO is so CPU bottle-necked and then runout and buy a shiny new CPU, you might end up sorely disappointed. That is until you alsoupgrade your graphics card. This quad core 3.6 gigahertzmanage i3 manages very solid frame rates with our2060, but then look at this stepping up to an i5 straightup doubles that performance. That's right, double! Don't you love it when your CPU does that? Show it some love byrocking a processor t-shirt or CPU pillow from lttstore.com. Finally, step up to a 3070, and spending even more money starts tolook like an okay idea. Our 9,900 lead gets evenlonger when it's paired with a powerhouse of a graphics cardlike this one, gaining over 50 FPS while our core i5lags behind with an increase that could be described asbenchmark margin of error. This illustrates why thesuite of applications used to evaluate aproduct is so important. We've taken flack, againmany times for including games that no one plays, instead of just testing the most popular titles on Twitch. But the reason we do it thatway is to demonstrate how different types of gamesmight run on a new product. The thing is we don't needthe exact FPS of every single E-sports game to know that ifit gets 250 FPS in Dota two, it's probably going to runLeague of Legends okay. We also want to know how it holds up in a more visuals focused game, right? Of course, while our testingfocused on gaming today, bottlenecks occur in alltypes of computing processes and operating system for example, can limit your file transfer speeds. You take the samecomputer throw Linux on it and all of a sudden, boom,you're copying files faster. Your onboard network port mightnot fully utilize your ISP's new two gigabit service oryour CPU might be sitting there with absolutely nothing todo while you're opening up a program, because your harddrive is struggling to deliver it any data that it needs to work. Thermals can also be a silent bottleneck. Taking a system that normally runs fine and then throttling itdown under heavy workloads. And then there's scientific computing. That's an area where unlikegaming, you might need hundreds of gigabytes or eventerabytes of system memory in order to keep an extrememulti-core processor like an AMD Thread Ripperor Epic fed with data. Speaking of lots of cores,do you need more for gaming? Well, the answer is yes,but only to a point. While modern games have beenmoving in that direction since the last generation ofhome consoles included eight core CPU's there's just a limitto how much can be done in parallel in a game because thework of one core is so often dependent on work that anothercore hasn't yet completed. So while it's notorious forperforming best on a 16 core Ryzenine 5950 X our Ashes ofthe Singularity: Escalation tests didn't actually see asmuch of an improvement in terms of FPS, as you might think after we moved from a respectablypowerful quad core. So in many cases, theperformance gains that you see on a chart where the highercore count one outperforms the lower core count one reallycome down to the manufacturer, tuning the turbos of theindividual cores so that those higher end onesturbo up to higher speeds. On AMD at least this issomething you might be able to overcome on your own withbasic software like Onesmus' Clock Tuner for Ryzen,so there you have it. The answer to the age oldquestion of what do I upgrade first CPU or graphics card is, it depends. That's because if you thinkabout it every system has a bottleneck because if itdidn't have a bottleneck, the performance would justkeep going to the moon. And the crazy part is thosebottlenecks shift around depending on what you're doing and how the rest of thesystem is configured. That's where the title came from. And that's one of the mainreasons it's so important to look at multiple reviews when you'reconsidering spending money on a gaming PC, 'cause noone can test every workload with every combination ofhardware, while also considering every upgrade path that may ormay not be available to you. But one thing you probably won't need to upgrade is your power supply. Seasonic power supplies arebuilt with the future in mind. They've got everything intheir lineup up to 1300 watt 80 plus platinum power supplies. They've got units that have12 year freaking warranties. So clearly there's a greatdegree of confidence in the product that it's going tolast you like three to four upgrade cycles of the rest of their gear. And they've also got a bunchof unique products, too. If you want a quiet build you can go for one oftheir fanless options. If you need something for anall white build like the one we just put together, they'vegot you covered there too. And the bottom line is man,Seasonic just makes good stuff. So go check them out at thelink in the video description. Thanks again, Seasonicfor sponsoring this video and guys let us know what other kinds of bottlenecks would you likeus to explore in the future? Leave a comment and then maybetake a look at some of the best 240 Hertz gaming monitorsthat we've been looking at. So you can make sure you're not missing out on all those FPSsis your system's making after you upgrade therest of your hardware.