- 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 bottlenecks are going to eat them all.
They don't want you to know about 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 reading between the lines?
The cron sheeple, just look, look!
Look at our sponsor!
Seasonic has got you covered no matter what kind of system
you're building and what kind of power supply you need.
They've got up to 80 plus titanium efficiency
and warranties that go for as long as 12 years.
Go check them out at the link in the video description.
(Electronic Dance Music)
A lot of you out there are probably
perfectly happy with your PC.
You built it and now you're gaming, working
or streaming away with minimal hiccups.
But what about those of you who crave unlimited power?
Well, for an enthusiast, it can be absolutely devastating
to finish a rig only to realize that one key part
is holding back the performance of all of the others.
If only you'd spent a little bit more or alternatively
if only you'd saved a bunch of money on the rest of it,
or is it really that straightforward?
In our most thorough investigation into system bottlenecks
to date, we took three games, three CPU's
and four graphics cards and put them on our test bench.
First up one of our favorite games for showcasing
smooth scaling across both CPU and GPU
shadowed the Tomb Raider at 1080p.
Well as it turns out, when you're low end consumer graphics
card can only get you about 17 FPS at high settings, you're
really not going to get a big boost 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 hardly made any difference at all.
Now upgrading to a 1050 Ti doubles our view RAM
from two gigs to four and gives us a faster GPU, and yet
we still don't see any major improvement from a better CPU.
As you can see from the next graph however, the second we
swapped for something beefier 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 gap between our six core i5 and our
eight core i9 but the performance gains for moving to a CPU
that's both significantly faster and has an extra two cores,
and two threads is a staggering 18% gain in terms of FPS.
What's even more interesting,
is that when we upgrade to an RTX 3070,
we see almost zero gain on our poor little quad core i3.
So maybe it actually doesn't matter if you can't get
your hands on a 3070, because for a lot of you out there,
there won't be much of an improvement if any.
As you can see though, with our higher end processors,
the gap does widen as the core i9
starts to leave the i5 in the dust.
Now this is a perfect illustration of why reviewers
configure their test benches the way they do.
We've been criticized many times 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 a little something like
WTF are you guys doing?
Nobody buys a $300 GPU and a $1000 CPU.
And that's a fair point, sure but the thing is reviews live
online indefinitely and a faster CPU will eventually come.
We might even review them, get subscribed by the way.
And the thing is by alleviating these bottlenecks
proactively using the best hardware we can get our hands on,
we get a much clearer picture of the true capabilities of
that graphics card even if it might take a little while
for a mid-range gaming tower to realize them.
One of the other things you've probably noticed is that
reviewers tend to benchmark games at different resolutions,
depending on what's being tested.
CPU reviews tend to focus on 1080p numbers while GPU reviews
can include performance data for 1440p, 4k and beyond.
Let's look at why.
On the same setup at 4k, yeah look at this graph.
When both the 1030 and 1050 Ti are asked to render
such a high fidelity scene, they end up
so bogged down that any CPU can keep up with them.
Even the 2060 hardly cares which CPU it's paired with.
And as for the 3070, while it certainly gains a few frames
from higher end processing power, really it isn't
gaining anywhere close to what it was at 1080p.
So at the end of the day at either resolution you have to
ask yourself, is it really worth spending almost double
the money on your CPU to eke 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 a good graphics card or whatever.
But the thing is, it's an older game that was tuned
for professional gameers to run 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 the internet that CSGO is so CPU
bottle-necked and then run out and buy a shiny new CPU,
you might end up sorely disappointed.
That is until you also upgrade your graphics card.
This quad core 3.6 gigahertz manage i3 manages very
solid frame rates with our 2060, but then look at this
stepping up to an i5 straight up doubles that performance.
That's right, double!
Don't you love it when your CPU does that?
Show it some love by rocking a processor t-shirt
or CPU pillow from lttstore.com.
Finally, step up to a 3070, and spending
even more money starts to look like an okay idea.
Our 9,900 lead gets even longer when it's paired with a
powerhouse of a graphics card like this one, gaining over
50 FPS while our core i5 lags behind with an increase
that could be described as benchmark margin of error.
This illustrates why the suite of applications
used to evaluate a product is so important.
We've taken flack, again many times for including
games that no one plays, instead of just
testing the most popular titles on Twitch.
But the reason we do it that way is to demonstrate how
different types of games might run on a new product.
The thing is we don't need the exact FPS of every single
E-sports game to know that if it gets 250 FPS in Dota two,
it's probably going to run League of Legends okay.
We also want to know how it holds
up in a more visuals focused game, right?
Of course, while our testing focused on gaming today,
bottlenecks occur in all types of computing processes
and operating system for example,
can limit your file transfer speeds.
You take the same computer throw Linux on it
and all of a sudden, boom, you're copying files faster.
Your onboard network port might not fully utilize your ISP's
new two gigabit service or your CPU might be sitting there
with absolutely nothing to do while you're opening up a
program, because your hard drive 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 it down under heavy workloads.
And then there's scientific computing.
That's an area where unlike gaming, you might need hundreds
of gigabytes or even terabytes of system memory
in order to keep an extreme multi-core processor
like an AMD Thread Ripper or 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 been moving in that direction
since the last generation of home consoles included eight
core CPU's there's just a limit to how much can be done in
parallel in a game because the work of one core is so often
dependent on work that another core hasn't yet completed.
So while it's notorious for performing best on a 16 core
Ryzenine 5950 X our Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
tests didn't actually see as much of an improvement in terms
of FPS, as you might think after we
moved from a respectably powerful quad core.
So in many cases, the performance gains that you see
on a chart where the higher core count one outperforms the
lower core count one really come down to the manufacturer,
tuning the turbos of the individual cores so that
those higher end ones turbo up to higher speeds.
On AMD at least this is something you might be able to
overcome on your own with basic software like Onesmus'
Clock Tuner for Ryzen, so there you have it.
The answer to the age old question of what do I upgrade
first CPU or graphics card is, it depends.
That's because if you think about it every system has a
bottleneck because if it didn't have a bottleneck,
the performance would just keep going to the moon.
And the crazy part is those bottlenecks shift around
depending on what you're doing
and how the rest of the system is configured.
That's where the title came from.
And that's one of the main reasons it's so important to look
at multiple reviews when you're considering spending money
on a gaming PC, 'cause no one can test every workload
with every combination of hardware, while also considering
every upgrade path that may or may not be available to you.
But one thing you probably won't need to
upgrade is your power supply.
Seasonic power supplies are built with the future in mind.
They've got everything in their lineup up to 1300 watt
80 plus platinum power supplies.
They've got units that have 12 year freaking warranties.
So clearly there's a great degree of confidence in the
product that it's going to last you like three to four
upgrade cycles of the rest of their gear.
And they've also got a bunch of unique products, too.
If you want a quiet build
you can go for one of their fanless options.
If you need something for an all white build like the one we
just put together, they've got you covered there too.
And the bottom line is man, Seasonic just makes good stuff.
So go check them out at the link in the video description.
Thanks again, Seasonic for sponsoring this video
and guys let us know what other kinds
of bottlenecks would you like us to explore in the future?
Leave a comment and then maybe take a look at some of the
best 240 Hertz gaming monitors that we've been looking at.
So you can make sure you're not missing
out on all those FPSs is your system's making
after you upgrade the rest of your hardware.