 Hmm, what's the perfect CPU for this build? Ooh, this looks pretty good. Now I just need a graphics card to pair it with, right? Hmm. Well, this looks too pinner. This is probably gonna bottleneck my CPU. But then this, huh, this is probably over the top. It might like destroy it just to be in close proximity to it. But, I mean, how do you keep from bottlenecking your CPU with your GPU? And then do you have to worry about picking the right CPU for the GPU? Can it work both ways? What is a balanced build even look like these days? Good thing we've got all the tools to find out! When I say bottleneck, what comes to your mind? Is it super laggy, unplayable framerates and games? Is it waiting five minutes just to load Windows? Is it the neck of a bottle? Whatever your exact experience with bottlenecks is, they all have one thing in common. Like a five-lane highway merging before a single lane tunnel, one aspect of your computer system will be holding back another one, keeping it from reaching its full performance potential. So, bottlenecking has become one of the most common fears among new PC builders. I mean, after all, no one likes wasting money. So are these concerns legit or has bottlenecking become some sort of boogie man for system builders to deter new users from configuring their own? We were actually inspired to make this video by the incredible bottlenecking that we experienced when we tried to game on this right here, a 64-core Xeon 5 system. But that was obviously an unrealistic scenario. I mean, this CPU is made up of 64 crappy Atom processors. So today's investigation will test just how badly we can bottleneck a more normal system built from actual desktop components. So in front of me here is a lower-end current-gen CPU, a popular but pretty obsolete CPU from 2013, and a high-end current generation processor. We're gonna start then with the most basic of our graphics cards, a GTX 1030. This will help us establish a baseline. Now, I'm actually expecting similar performance in games going all the way from a mid-tier processor from five years ago, all the way up to the brand new one. That would indicate a GPU bottleneck where it's holding back our better CPU. And success, I guess? Because we're basically even across the board. Surprisingly, CSGO actually runs really well on this card, averaging over 120 FPS for all of our benches. But what's less surprising is the way that in a gaming workload, an underpowered graphics card will perform its best, pretty much regardless of which CPU it gets paired with. So you heard it here first, folks. A processor upgrade will do nothing for your gaming experience if your GPU can't keep up. With that said, 3D creation software, Blender, reveals a difference between our platforms, demonstrating that whether a system is bottlenecked or not is heavily dependent on the type of work you plan to do on it. Now then, let's retest everything with a GTX 1060 and see how the situation changes. Right away, we're greeted with, oh, good, a difference! So the Core i7 pulls way ahead in Assassin's Creed Origins and CSGO and 3DMark confirms this data with a much nicer spread between our platforms, which means then that our more powerful processors are getting to stretch their legs a little more because they're not being held back to the same degree. But wait, it appears as though the GTX 1060 is still the bottleneck for Deus Ex and Far Cry 5. This is where our second lesson about bottlenecks comes in. It can even be dependent on the individual piece of software with some games favoring faster CPUs and others needing more GPU horsepower in order to look their best. Coming back around then to our non-gaming tests, the results confirmed that productivity still likes a fast CPU to keep the GPU fed. Who knew? Who knew? Okay, then. So that's probably quite enough of these blue-collar GPUs where the devil is the Titan V. James! James is running something on the Titan V right now, so we're going to use this Titan V box, this GTX 1070, and this gold Sharpie marker to create a reasonable facsimile of a Titan V. Here we're expecting some pretty different results and yes, we have finally broken the GPU bottleneck on Deus Ex and our Ryzen 3 is definitely beating out the FX6350 for the first time in Far Cry 5, showing us what an optimized title can do. Unfortunately, Blender still doesn't run on the Titan V, so we're just left with V-Ray and which doesn't scale. Bringing us to our last test scenario, dropping our monitor's resolution down to 1280 x 1024 on that very same Titan V test platform. And oh, what's this? Interesting. Even with the Titan V, we're back to same old Titan V, we're back to CPU bottlenecking? Ah, yes. The final lesson is that bottlenecks will also appear and disappear depending on the settings that you're using in your program. Lower resolution gaming is easier on the graphics card, but actually doesn't ease the CPU's job to nearly the same degree and higher resolution gaming is harder on the graphics card, but since that drives the frame rates lower, the CPU doesn't end up having to work as hard. So if your gaming system was severely CPU bottlenecked, you actually might be able to upgrade your monitor and play at a higher resolution without losing any FPS. Go figure. So really the main takeaway here is that there is no way to avoid bottlenecks altogether. Think about it. A theoretical system with no bottlenecks would have unlimited performance in every workload because nothing would be a limiting factor. Obviously, that's ridiculous. Something is always going to hold you back and you can't get paralyzed by the bottleneck boogie man. As you've seen here, as long as you apply some common sense to your config and avoid pairing $30 CPUs with $3,000 graphics cards, you should be just fine and you can always ask for advice. Like maybe over on the Linus Tech Tips forum about where the bottleneck might be in your system and how severe it might be. Just make sure to provide some information about what you expect to use your PC for and what kind of settings you expect to run at or as you can see, it's gonna be pretty hard to help you. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should definitely join so you can get bottleneck advice.