What is Bottleneck or Bottlenecking on your PC System?

A BOTTLENECK occurs when there is some restricted element holding back the performance that could otherwise be achieved. Fluid flows much slower through the neck of the bottle than if the neck does not excess. Another word for a bottleneck is the CHOKE POINT.

Let us start with a couple of examples. In a vehicle, the traction between the tires and the road is important for optimal power delivery between the engine and the road making the car move forward. Now an example where traction would be a bottleneck if your engine were so powerful and then you go to accelerate, the wheels just spin. Now at high speeds a wing could improve traction by using airflow to force the rear of the car down towards the road. This can alleviate that bottleneck. That sounds great! 

But, can we all just put wings on our cars? No. Some cars are not actually limited to wheel traction and it does not have even sufficient power for the benefit of the downward force to outweigh the negative effects of the additional wing resistance caused by this upgrade. So, in this case, it was not a bottleneck at all. So, changing it does not help, actually it could make things worse.

Another example, let see if you take a very old computer assuming it is even compatible. You put a very expensive thousand dollars graphics card in it. The PC is not going to slow down. Hence, honestly, the gaming performance will probably be improved but that card will not reach its potential. Even though the new card might be 10 times faster than the old one, you may only get a small performance increase because the CPU, memory, and potentially other components are so slow that they cannot give the graphics card data at a fast enough rate to keep it busy. Therefore, it will be sitting there most of the time.

In that example of bottlenecking, those funds could be put to better use. An All-around system upgrade could improve gaming and other applications at the same time.

Well, the truth is everything has bottlenecks. You can just hide from them until a point where a task can be performed perfectly and instantly, something is always holding back or bottlenecking the process. So, if they excess everywhere, what can we do about them? 

The answer is to reduce them. Avoid extreme bottlenecks. Think about what you are trying to achieve and direct your resources towards the things that directly affect the performance of the things that you want to do.

Let us go back to PCs as an example. If you are a gamer, spending a big chunk of your budget on a graphics card does make sense as long as the rest of your components are reasonably at par.

TIP: In purchasing your PC components, familiarize yourself or ask someone about latest technologies and latest releases. Using components released in the same period could help you prevent bottlenecking.