Bottleneck guide, best CPU/GPU configs

[Braden Fontaine]

I know people tend to toss the term bottleneck around pretty carelessly, that aside, I'm looking for a good bottleneck guide. i don't care much for benchmarks as they do not always tell the real world performance you will get on a day to day basis, what I'm looking for is a good guide to accurately show at what point does what CPU hold back what GPU?

a good representation of "Bottlenecking"

 

[clutchc]

That is one area I have not seen addressed in a guide format. It is more of a 'seat of the pants' determination. Bottle neck simply means that the CPU will be working as hard as it can, while the GPU waits on it, thus limiting the performance of the gfx card. That situation varies so much from game to game, single player to multiplayer, number of players on a server, etc. that it would be hard to make a one size fits all determination. Some games are more CPU limited and some are more GPU limited. I doubt it would be possible to make a definitive guide.

For instance, I have an aging Phenom II X4 @ 4.0 GHz and a R9-280 that runs every single player game I've tried at 100% GPU/50-80% CPU usage. No bottle neck. But when gaming online on a busy server where the CPU has to keep track of 64 other players, that quickly changes. But even than, it is only momentarily depending on other in-game factors.