That’s when you might resort to online bottleneck calculators, but are these tools trustworthy?

What Is a Bottleneck?

In simple terms, abottleneckdescribes a mismatch in performance between two PC components.

Close up of the CyberPowerPC AMD Advantage Series gaming PC case

Justin Duino / How-To Geek

The slowest component is the bottleneck.

Let’s use a quick analogy.

Imagine a highway with four lanes with a section of the road under construction.

Bottleneck calculator results for the RTX 3060 Ti and Ryzen 5 5600.

PC Builds

Traffic is limited to only two lanes in that part, which leads to congestion.

A similar thing can happen on your PC.

Technically, any PC part could be a bottleneck.

A bottleneck calculator showing the results for a Ryzen 5 5600 and RTX 4080.

PC Builds

A motherboard that can’t provide stable power to your CPU slightly hinders its performance.

A mouse with a low polling rate updates the cursor location less frequently.

Since they’re synthetic tools, they inherently can’t provide the sameaccuracyas a real benchmark.

Nonetheless, they’re an okay starting point for your build.

Games, video editing, and machine learning tasks all rely on the GPU, so pick GPU-intensive tasks.

Both were on the lower end of the mid-range lineups at the time of release.

Nonetheless, the bottleneck calculator showed a significant percentage that’d make you reconsider your combination.