The term bottleneck is everywhere when we're talking about PC gaming performance.
A bottleneck occurs when there is a restrictive element holding back the performance that could otherwise
be achieved.
If you're just getting started with planning your first PC build.
This may be a hard concept to grasp and that is why this bottleneck and explanation is very important
when you are dealing with bottlenecks.
It is important to know why one would happen, how to find them, and most importantly, how to avoid
them.
The name bottleneck comes from the way that fluid flows much slower through the neck of a bottle than
it would if that neck didn't exist.
Hence, another word for a bottleneck is a choke point.
For example, let's turn a bottle full of water upside down and open the lid.
The water is flowing out of the bottle only at the rate at which the bottle opening will allow.
The wider the opening is, the faster the water will flow out of the bottle and the smaller the opening
is.
The water will flow a lot slower.
Imagine that instead of water we have frames and these frames are being displayed onto your monitor.
Display in the frames is of course your PC.
But let's stick with the concept of a bottle for now.
The opening of the bottle can represent any component in your system that may restrict the number of
frames that could potentially be displayed.
The easiest way to explain this is as if you take a very old computer and assuming it's even compatible,
you put the very latest thousand graphics card in the PC.
The PC is not going to slow down and the gaming performance will most probably be improved, but that
card won't reach its highest potential, even though the new card might be ten times faster than the
old one, depending on the bottleneck.
You may only get a small performance increase because the CPU memory and potentially other components
are so slow that they can't feed the graphics card data at a fast enough rate to keep it busy.