Hidden Bottlenecks

Balance is key to everything; this goes for cosmic forces of the universe and the hardware you have on your PC.

Sensing a Disturbance

Stop me if you've heard this before: you're minding your own business, cruising the hyperspace of the internet as you normally do, but something feels off. Your pages don't load up as fast as you want, there's stuttering on the video you're watching, the game you're playing is taking forever to load, or your mouse is stuttering across the screen. The bottom line is something feels off.

A PC is a wonderful piece of machinery, but like the Millennium Falcon, you've got to work on it from time to time. You need to diagnose what the problem is and see what you can do to fix it. However, they're not always easy to find; that's where hidden bottlenecks are an issue.

So, what is a bottleneck? Well, it's when one hardware component restricts the performance of another and prevents your PC from reaching its maximum potential. Like if you put a pencil top on the end of your lightsaber, instead of this steady beam of light that can slice into steel, it's a glorified laser pointer.

What makes bottlenecks difficult to diagnose is that, unlike other computer problems, there's technically nothing wrong with your system. No error messages pop up explaining that your RAM isn't compatible with your board, or your CPU and GPU are mismatched. Why is your game stuttering when you have a solid amount of RAM in your system? Well, older games don't work well with modern RAM configurations.

The Hidden Bottlenecks

What also makes bottlenecks difficult is that, like the Sith, they won't be discovered until they reveal themselves. A good example is thermal throttling: say you purchase a PC and open it up. Everything is there — there's a CPU air cooler, steady airflow with the placement of the fans, everything looks correct and fits together perfectly. Turning it on, nothing bad happens and you get everything set up and start working. A few hours later, however, the dark side reveals itself when your system overheats and shuts down. As it turns out, the air cooler that was correctly attached to the CPU couldn't handle the thermals that the CPU itself could put out.

So, what are the solutions?

We at AVADirect, like the Jedi Knights of old, are vigilant and guard against issues like thermal throttling or part incompatibilities by testing all our systems for prolonged periods of time to ensure that such an issue is found out sooner rather than later. We work hard to ensure that the custom computers we create don't have these issues; this is built into our procedure by identifying incompatibilities for each system or group of systems we make. This is something that prebuilt systems sometimes are compromised for the preference of mass production and fast shipping.

Sometimes the solution could be as simple as a part swap: if your CPU works fine, the cooling is doing its job, and the RAM is performing within the margins you expect, but the GPU is drawing too much power from the power supply, then a simple solution is upgrading the power supply or changing the GPU to one that's compatible with the power needed to function.

The bottom line is that these bottlenecks can be problems that don't simply go away with a simple software update. They can be avoided with the knowledge and experience of dealing with them or be dealt with by changing out parts and rebuilding your configuration. If anything in the above article has been something you've had to deal with — a hidden problem that emerged from nowhere and has caused nothing but a headache — then it might be time to rethink your system.