Computers consist of many different system configurations, when trying to upgrade your computer, overclock, or trying to understand if your computer is capable of playing a new game you’ll hear the term ‘bottleneck’ somewhere or another.
Bottleneck
Courtesy of jbelluch

What’s a bottleneck?

Bottleneck is referring to the limiting factor in one’s computer hardware that prevents the rest of the hardware working optimally. It’s typically the slowest part in your computer, and since all the parts work together, it slows down your entire system, because the faster hardware has to wait on the slower hardware for it to do whatever it needs to do.

Every computer has a bottleneck, the key is to figuring out what that bottleneck is, and if it’s hindering you with a certain task like gaming, or just pure processing power. In every system there is a default bottleneck, one piece of hardware that physically can’t run as fast as the others. Do you know what that component is?

The Hard Drive is the Biggest Bottleneck

Currently, traditional hard drives are the slowest components in a computer, even a 10,000, or 15,000 RPM hard drive is still the slowest piece of hardware in your computer, and it will remain that way until solid-state hard drives gain their ground. Traditional hard drives store their data on rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. It takes time for this platter to speed up to it’s optimal reading/writing speed, and then there’s delays to access the disk as well. Also due to the way their designed one can only make the hard drive platter spin so fast, hard drives are the only components that have to wait for it to spin up, then spin down, etc.

Solid state drives address this issue by using solid state memory to store the data. So now instead of acting like a conventional hard drive, it’s more like computer’s memory that isn’t erased when powered off. This will speed up the hard drive tremendously and remove the hard drive as the biggest computer hardware bottleneck.

So What’s The Other Computer Hardware Bottleneck?

Depending on your computer hardware your bottleneck could be a number of things, but it also depends on what you plan on using your system for.

In gaming if you have an older graphics card, yet the rest of your system is up to date then your hardware’s bottleneck would be the graphics card and it would be limiting the graphics quality and the frames per second that you can play your games at. If your graphics card is brand new and has good specifications, then your RAM or your processor could be your computer hardware’s bottleneck depending on whether you have enough RAM to support the extra memory usage by the game’s high quality resolutions. If your processor isn’t fast enough to process all the information for the game then that will be the bottleneck.

For everyday system use, getting a solid state drive, or upgrading your current hard drive to something faster would show you a considerable improvement, but it won’t be as major as it could be if your memory or your processor is limiting your hard drive’s speed, because it has to wait for it.

There’s no sure fire way to find your computer hardware’s bottleneck, it’s mostly guess and check and figuring it out yourself. Take a look at my basic system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (OCed to 2.75GHz)
1GB DDR PC3200 Memory
10k RPM SATA Hard Drive
nVidia 7900GT 256mb Graphics Card
Asus A8N5X Socket 939 Motherboard

This is just a basic rundown of my system specs. What do you think would be my computer hardware’s bottleneck? Well, I think it’d be the processor, because it’s not dual-core and it’s starting to be a little slow. Though I could say my motherboard is slowing me down, because it has a socket 939 slot which the processors are no longer being made for it, and have long since gone out of stores. Or if you think the processor is fast enough you could say my memory is still too slow because it’s not DDR2, or DDR3 memory.

See what I mean? The bottleneck can be anything that’s limiting your system from performing at it’s best. I’m looking to upgrade my PC soon, I may just build a new one, but what do you think is my greatest computer hardware bottleneck?