How to determine a system's bottleneck

[williama]

I've always wondered if there was some program out there that you could run and tell it the type of program you want to use and have it gauge your system and report where the bottlenecks on performance are.

Does something like this exist?

 

[DSF]

Not really.

Did you have a specific application or type of application in mind?

 

[mpilchfamily]

Well first of all you can list your system specs and the kind of applications you like to run. Then we can give you a good idea if there is a bottle neck in your system.

 

[williama]

My system is fine, but I get asked this a lot and was wondering if there was some way to tell without having to write it down and ask in a forum.

 

[JackMDS]

Bottle neck is Not a general issue.

It can be any component depending on what you need to do.

As an example if you do not Network then there is No Bottle Neck related to Network, and the computer might work very well.

You start to Network and it is slow, then it means that there is some thong related to network that has to be dealt with.

 

[williama]

Granted but it's for online gaming usually and we can try to assume the network isn't a bottleneck.

I'm more concerned with identifying cpu/ram/harddisk/video card issues and which is the biggest slowdown in a system. Are the general purpose benchmark programs good for this?

 

[betasub]

You are missing the point. The bottleneck or limiting factor on a system is specific to the application, suite or work load. On the same system, one user might be disk I/O limited whereas another user could be memory bandwidth limited - it all depends on the work they are carrying out.

You are probably aware that a lot of gamers are video card limited - but that's only because they tend to play modern, eye-candy games at hi-res. They can easily shift the "bottleneck" elsewhere by reducing the detail/resolution, or switching to a different app/game.

 

[williama]

understood.

so how does one look at a system and say yes, it's the cpu that's slowing you down, or the ram or the video-card or the hard drive?

I could easily see the video card, if you lower graphics options if the speed increases then it's the video card but it's less easy for me to come up with a way to say your ram is slowing you down.

 

[betasub]

You don't just look at the system hardware, you also consider the user profile. A user that professionally photo- and video-edits on Vista64 is probably going to need at least 4GB RAM and possibly a secondary harddrive as a discrete "scratch disk", whereas an gamer on XP is probably fine with 2GB RAM and a single harddrive (big enough for all those multi-GB game installs) along with the best GPU he can afford.

 

[Denithor]

Every chain has a weakest link. If the load on the chain isn't enough to break that link, you'll never know which it is. But stress it a little too far and it will become obvious.

Same for computers, every one has a bottleneck. Whether or not you notice depends on what you are doing with the computer. For gamers, if all hardware is at least up to a certain level, the weak link will be the GPU (4870X2 or even SLI GTX 280 can be the weakest part of a system, although you'll probably never notice it).