 You know what? Your last PC upgrade? Complete waste of money. Why? Cause it's not about nanometers. It's not about jiggerhertz. It's bottlenecks. The bottlenecks are gonna eat them all. They don't want you to know about this because the truth is, every PC has a bottleneck. More than one. I mean, you can upgrade and upgrade and upgrade and get nothing. Haven't you been reading between the lines? Come on sheeple. Just look, look! Look at our sponsor. See Sonic has got you covered no matter what kind of system you're building and what kind of power supply you need. They've got up to 80 plus titanium efficiency and warranties that go for as long as 12 years. Go check them out at the link in the video description. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, saved a bunch of money on the rest of it. Or is it really that straightforward? In our most thorough investigation into system bottlenecks to date, we took three games, three CPUs, and four graphics cards and put them on our test bench. First up, one of our favorite games for showcasing smooth scaling across both CPU and GPU, Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p. Well, as it turns out, when your low-end consumer graphics card can only get you about 17 FPS at high settings, you're really not gonna get a big boost from upgrading your CPU. In our case, the Core i5-9600K actually performed worse than the Core i3-8100, and then the 9900K hardly made any difference at all. Now upgrading to a 1050 Ti doubles our VRAM from two gigs to four and gives us a faster GPU, and yet we still don't see any major improvement from a better CPU. As you can see from the next graph, however, the second we swapped for something beefier, like an RTX 2060 with six gigs of VRAM and more than double the CUDA cores, we're off to the races. Now there isn't a huge gap between our six-core i5 and our eight-core i9, but the performance gains from moving to a CPU that's both significantly faster and has an extra two cores and two threads is a staggering 18% gain in terms of FPS. What's even more interesting is that when we upgrade to an RTX 3070, we see almost zero gain on our poor little quad-core i3. So maybe it actually doesn't matter if you can't get your hands on a 3070 because for a lot of you out there, there won't be much of an improvement, if any. As you can see though, with our higher-end processors, the gap does widen as the Core i9 starts to leave the i5 in the dust. Now this is a perfect illustration of why reviewers configure their test benches the way they do. We've been criticized many times over the years for using, let's say, an extreme edition processor in a review of a mid-range graphics card. And it usually goes a little something like, WTF are you guys doing? Nobody buys a $300 GPU and $1,000 CPU. And that's a fair point, sure. But the thing is, reviews live online indefinitely, and a faster CPU will eventually come. We might even review them. Get subscribed, by the way. And the thing is, by alleviating these bottlenecks proactively, using the best hardware we can get our hands on, we get a much clearer picture of the true capabilities of that graphics card, even if it might take a little while for a mid-range gaming tower to realize them. One of the other things you've probably noticed is that reviewers tend to benchmark games at different resolutions, depending on what's being tested. CPU reviews tend to focus on 1080p numbers, while GPU reviews can include performance data for 1440p, 4K, and beyond. Let's look at why. On the same setup at 4K. Yeah, look at this graph. When both the 1030 and 1050 Ti are asked to render such a high fidelity scene, they end up so bogged down that any CPU can keep up with them. Even the 2060 hardly cares which CPU it's paired with. And as for the 3070, while it certainly gains a few frames from higher end processing power, really it isn't gaining anywhere close to what it was at 1080p. So at the end of the day, at either resolution, you have to ask yourself, is it really worth spending almost double the money on your CPU to eke out just a few more FPS? Is the bottleneck really all that bad? Well, it can be. Some programs inherently load certain components differently. Take CSGO. CSGO is a game. CSGO is a game. So it needs a good graphics card or whatever. But the thing is, it's an older game that was tuned for professional gamers to run it at very high frame rates on previous generation graphics cards. So as you can see from our benchmarks, if you were to read on the internet that CSGO is so CPU bottlenecked, and then run out and buy a shiny new CPU, you might end up sorely disappointed. That is until you also upgrade your graphics card. This quad core 3.6 gigahertz i3 manages very solid frame rates with our 2060. But then look at this, stepping up to an i5, straight up doubles that performance. That's right, double. Don't you love it when your CPU does that? Show it some love by rocking a processor T-shirt or CPU pillow from lttstore.com. Finally, step up to a 3070, and spending even more money starts to look like an okay idea. Our 9900's lead gets even longer when it's paired with a powerhouse of a graphics card like this one gaining over 50 FPS while our core i5 lags behind with an increase that could be described as benchmark margin and error. This illustrates why the suite of applications used to evaluate a product is so important. We've taken flack, again, many times for including games that no one plays instead of just testing the most popular titles on Twitch. But the reason we do it that way is to demonstrate how different types of games might run on a new product. The thing is, we don't need the exact FPS of every single e-sports game to know that if it gets 250 FPS in Dota 2, it's probably gonna run League of Legends okay. We also wanna know how it holds up in a more visuals-focused game, right? Of course, while our testing focused on gaming today, bottlenecks occur in all types of computing processes. An operating system, for example, can limit your file transfer speeds. You take the same computer, throw Linux on it, and all of a sudden, boom, you're copying files faster. Your onboard network port might not fully utilize your ISP's new two gigabit service or your CPU might be sitting there with absolutely nothing to do while you're opening up a program because your hard drive is struggling to deliver it any data that it needs to work. Thermals can also be a silent bottleneck, taking a system that normally runs fine and then throttling it down under heavy workloads. And then there's scientific computing. That's an area where, unlike gaming, you might need hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of system memory in order to keep an extreme multi-core processor like an AMD Threadripper or Epic fed with data. Speaking of lots of cores, do you need more for gaming? Well, the answer is yes, but only to a point. While modern games have been moving in that direction since the last generation of home consoles included eight core CPUs, there's just a limit to how much can be done in parallel in a game because the work of one core is so often dependent on work that another core hasn't yet completed. So while it's notorious for performing best on a 16 core Ryzen 9 5950X, our ashes of the singularity escalation tests didn't actually see as much of an improvement in terms of FPS as you might think after we moved from a respectably powerful quad core. So in many cases, the performance gains that you see on a chart where the higher core count one outperforms the lower core count one really come down to the manufacturer tuning the turbos of the individual cores so that those higher end ones turbo up to higher speeds. On AMD at least, this is something you might be able to overcome on your own with basic software like one us Mrs. Clock tuner for Ryzen. So there you have it. The answer to the age old question of what do I upgrade first CPU or graphics card is it depends. That's because if you think about it, every system has a bottleneck because if it didn't have a bottleneck, the performance would just keep going to the moon. And the crazy part is those bottlenecks shift around depending on what you're doing and how the rest of the system is configured. That's where the title came from. And that's one of the main reasons it's so important to look at multiple reviews when you're considering spending money on a gaming PC. Cause no one can test every workload with every combination of hardware while also considering every upgrade path that may or may not be available to you. But one thing you probably won't need to upgrade is your power supply. See Sonic power supplies are built with the future in mind. They've got everything in their lineup, up to 1300 watt, 80 plus platinum power supplies. They've got units that have 12 year freaking warranties. So clearly there's a great degree of confidence in the product that it's gonna last you like three to four upgrade cycles of the rest of their gear. And they've also got a bunch of unique products too. If you want a quiet build, you can go for one of their fanless options. If you need something for an all white build, like one that we just put together, they've got you covered there too. And the bottom line is, man, see Sonic just makes good stuff. So go check them out at the link in the video description. Thanks again, see Sonic for sponsoring this video. And guys, let us know what other kinds of bottlenecks would you like us to explore in the future? Leave a comment and then maybe take a look at some of the best 240 Hertz gaming monitors that we've been looking at. So you can make sure you're not missing out on all those FPS's your system's making after you upgrade the rest of your hardware.