Even if you are relatively new to the world of PC gaming, you’ve most likely heard the term “bottleneck” or “bottlenecking”. Chances are these terms left you scratching your head and wondering just what the heck these other PC gamers are complaining about.
To put things simply, a “bottleneck” is the term used to refer to when a single component in your system limits the performance of the whole system. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, most computers will have some sort of “bottleneck”. The goal for yourself when picking out or customizing a CyberPowerPC should be to make sure the system is as well balanced as possible or suited to the tasks you want the system to perform well in, so that you do not miss out on performance.
The most common, widely recognized bottlenecks in the world of PC gaming are bottlenecks between the CPU and GPU. These occur when one of the two is more heavily loaded than the other. That is to say that some games will be more demanding and load up your GPU very heavily, while others may be less graphically intensive and instead push your CPU harder.
Another commonly experienced bottleneck exists in your choice of storage device. Hard drives and SSDs of all kinds have different speeds that they can read and write the data that is stored on your computer. For example, a game stored on a hard drive would load much slower than if it were stored and played from a super speedy M.2 NVMe SSD. Another benefit of a faster drive would be quicker boot times, meaning you can go from start up to using your PC significantly faster.
Internet speed is another bottleneck you may run into, especially if you love playing online multiplayer games. This one is a bit different, as your connection speed will depend on the internet service that you have in your home, but there is still some things you can do to get the most out of whatever internet you have. Opting for a wired connection, rather than WiFi, is one such way you can optimize your connection for gaming. If a wired connection is not an option, having a quality WiFi card or adapter in your system is your next best bet for a great connection.
Temperature is another area that can present a bottleneck. Outside of adding more fans, or upgrading your cooling solutions for the system, there are some things you can do to ensure that your system can run at optimal temperatures. Making sure to have your PC in a well ventilated area, where it has plenty of room to intake cool clean air and expel hot air, is ideal. So avoiding placing your PC in an enclosed space is a good call. Besides that, keeping the PC itself and your living space as dust free as possible can go a long way in keeping temperatures just right.
Another bottleneck, that is perhaps overlooked more often than one would think, is the monitor you have paired with your PC. Let’s imagine you get a beastly CyberPowerPC, equipped with say a top of the line Intel Core or AMD Ryzen CPU, and a top of the line NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 6900XT. A system with this sort of power will be able to crank out high framerates at high resolutions. If you pair this with say, a 60hz 1080p monitor, you are leaving a lot of the benefits of that high performance to go to waste. In this case, a 1440p or even 4K monitor with a 144hz+ refresh rate would be the optimal choice, so that you can actually see the benefit of the hardware, like that of this example, that can crush demanding games with maxed out graphics and resolution.
Thanks for reading! We hope you found this article informative. Now you can go out and recognize some bottlenecks, know of some solutions, and impress your PC buddies with your newfound knowledge of some of the lingo.