bottlenecking

Unless you have SSD drives then it's bound to be your hard disks, isn't it? After all everything else in a 'puter is measured in nano seconds whereas hard drives are measured in milli seconds?
 
I think this is the most difficult topic in terms of computer hardware. They lend themselves reasonably well to limiting factors but it can be very tricky to work out where the bottleneck is. It also varies depending on the software being run.

For example, I have a 4ghz cpu with an nvidia 8800gt. For gaming at high resolution this would be very unbalanced, the card being far too slow. However for cpu f@h, most cad work, matlab etc the graphics card is barely loaded so the system is cpu (possibly ram frequency) limited.

There are basically two options. Benchmark then underclock a part and repeat the benchmark, do this to ram/cpu/graphics card, multiple times. Then overclock, again to varying degrees while benchmarking. This will leave you with lots of data from which you can try to work out which part is the slowest for that benchmark. Obviously the benchmark must be appropriate.

Or, you just get every piece running as fast as you can reasonably afford and try not to worry about it. Hard drive will be the limiting point for anything that needs repeated disk access, most things do.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom