How to check if your processor is creating a bottleneck
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The bottleneck is one of the terms most feared by PC gamers, this effect occurs when one of the components is limiting the performance of the rest so that we cannot obtain from them all the benefits that they could offer us.
Learn how to detect the processor bottleneck
One of the signs that we are suffering a bottleneck is that our graphics card offers very poor performance compared to other users who use the same model. The most common thing is that the processor is the limiting performance, graphics cards advance very fast so if you have a CPU with several years behind it, it is likely that it is falling short.
There is a very simple way to check if we are suffering a bottleneck, we only have to monitor the workload of our processor and the graphics card while we are playing. If the processor load is very high and the graphics card load is very low, it will be an unequivocal sign that we are experiencing a bottleneck in our processor.
To monitor the processor and the graphics card we are going to need to make use of some external tool to Windows, one of the most popular is MSI Afterburber, which is totally free and very easy to use.
Once we have downloaded and installed MSI Afterburber we have to configure some of its options, in this tutorial we are going to use only what is necessary to see if we are suffering from a processor bottleneck. The first step is to access the application settings menu.
The second step will be to make MSI Afterburber show us the data on the use of the processor and the graphics card, this application allows us to see the load of the processor as a whole and of each of its cores, which is why it is one of the best. The data that interests us is the load of the graphics card and the processor, we can also activate the frames per second and the RAM memory consumption.
With this we already have everything ready to monitor our PC, the next step is to open a game and see the data that MSI Afterburber offers us, if the percentage of use of the processor is very high and that of the graphics card is very low, we will be suffering a processor bottleneck on the graphics card. In an ideal situation, the graphics card should have a use as close as possible to 100%.
As we can see in the following image, my graphics card is barely over 70% of use and the processor is very close to 100%, I am suffering a bottleneck. To solve this there are two possible remedies, the first one is to overlock the processor, as my Core i3 4160 does not allow it, I only have the second option, change the processor for a more powerful one.
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