Bottlenecking and wtf is it?

[Grayy_]

Is my 1070 bottlenecking my i5 6600?
Honestly no idea what bottlenecking really is but I feel like I'm not getting full potential with these two part together? Help me boys

 

[jwcrellin]

Nope, your setup is fine from what you said. Bottlenecking is when one part of your build is keeping some others from their full potential. That's why its so important to keep your build balanced.

 

[LucoTF]

As John Spartan said, your build is fine.

 

[Dunlop0078]

What game? What is cpu and gpu usage in that game? Not giving us a lot to go on here. What makes you think you have a bottleneck? "I feel like I'm not getting full potential" is not a good answer, I have nothing to go on. I would not think a 6600 would bottleneck a 1070 in any significant way.

 

[LilDog1291]

So a "bottleneck" is exactly as it sounds. If you go to a vending machine today, soft drinks dont really have the classic Coca-Cola glass bottle with the long neck any more but think of that shape. There is a lot of fluid at the bottom but only a small opening for it to go through. So if you turn it upside down, it takes a bit for it to all pour out. If you were to change the shape of the bottle so that the opening was uniform with the rest of the bottle, then it would all come out at once if you tipped it over.

So in the case of computers, a "bottleneck" is any component that prevents the whole system from operating at full capacity. System builders are guilty of this sometimes when they decide to purchase an i3 series processor and then go all out on a GTX 1080. The processor could not hope to keep up with the processing power needed to move information around to be rendered by the GPU.

As far as knowing yourself which component will bottleneck another, thats where research comes in. Unless you are loaded and can afford to buy all the parts and test them out without consequence, you have to rely on sites like Toms or Linus Tech Tips to do the work for you and put all these components to the test to see what their limits are.

If you need a quick visual for which parts bottleneck others, check out http://www.logicalincrements.com/
The author(s) do a good job and selecting parts at each price point to ensure no part bottlenecks another.

Hope this helps.