What is Bottle Neck?

[steveN7x]

Havn't a clue what this means. But see them on a forum every now and then. The specs to my PC I want to get are these:

ASRock 990FX Extreme9 ATX AM3+ Motherboard
G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory
AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8-Core Processor
Asus Radeon R9 280X 3GB Video Card

Will i bottle neck? Or can someoe explain it to me?

 

[rolli59]

Bottleneck one component keeps another one to perform to full potential. Most commonly refereed to CPU limiting performance of GPU in your case you are fine. As an example if you had FX4300 it would hold back the 280X.

 

[Eximo]

Within computers it is all about throughput/bandwidth. The metaphor is that the bottleneck is narrower then the base of the bottle. You can't pour out liquid any faster then the neck will allow, while a glass would be able to dump it out more quickly. The base represents one component and the neck another.

If you get a cheap CPU it may only be able to handle a 3 or so Gbps, while a very powerful video card might be able to handle 4 Gbps. (numbers are made up, modern equipment is extremely fast) If they don't match up fairly closely, then one component will have idle time that could be used to increase performance. The same is true between any component in the computer. RAM can limit system performance, Hard drives, etc. Any system you can put together will have bottlenecks, but they only become apparent when one component reaches its limit. If you build a system that can withstand the workloads you give it, then you can say that you don't have an effective bottleneck, but it will still be there.