@endyd4 said:
If i buy a hign end CPU and GPU and chose the cheapest motherboard to fit both of them , that would be a bottleneck ?
No. Sorry for the confusion. I'll try to break it down further to help you.
1) Generally speaking, the CPU and GPU are going to be the primary potential sources of bottleneck. If you want to run a game in 1080p at medium settings, for example, the puts a certain load on these two parts of your system. If your GPU is easily capable of handling its burden, but the CPU is too slow, then you'll have poor performance in the game. This is a "CPU bottleneck". Conversely, if your CPU is easily capable of handling its burden, but the GPU is too slow, then you'll have poor performance in the game. This is a "GPU bottleneck".
So to get a certain level of performance in a game, at certain settings, you'll need both a sufficient GPU and CPU. But what is "sufficient"? This depends on what you are trying to run. Dishonored is a "recent" game that had very low GPU demands relative to The Witcher 2. So you might never bump up against the limits of your hardware in Dishonored, but could hit a GPU bottleneck in The Witcher 2 if you didn't turn your graphics quality settings down.
Ok
2) The motherboard is unlikely to be a bottleneck. Two examples 04dcarraher and I were discussing above where it *could* be, are basically examples of an out-of-date motherboard, really. His example is a motherboard that has a PCI-e video card slot (great!) but it's an old type (8x 1.1). In this situation, the flow of information between your card and the rest of the system is going to be slowed down by that out of date interface. My example was a motherboard that only supports an older type of CPU. My example was kind of lame, because it was really just another way of saying "too slow a CPU can create a bottleneck for your GPU". In my example, you might have a fast PCI-e interface, a fast graphics card, but the best CPU you can install is a slow/old one.
In other words, a cheap motherboard is likely fine, as long as it has a PCI-e 16x 2.0 or better PCI-e slot, and as long as it supports a fast enough CPU. But cheap stuff can fail, or might not allow for much upgrading down the line, so it's worthwhile to research your motherboard. I've never bought very expensive motherboards. But I've always bought name-brand and have bought ones that would allow some better CPUs etc to be installed down the line.
3) In summary, if your motherboard can actually support a high end CPU and GPU, then to answer your question: it is probably not going to bottleneck performance. (motherboards do have other limitations, like how much RAM they can hold, how fast the RAM can be, etc, but for most practical purposes if it can support a high end CPU and GPU then it probably can do what you need it to do).
Is there a specific combination of hardware you are considering? Folks on here can probably help judge how good it is, especially if you also provide a budget (otherwise people will always tell you to get the bestest beefiest things available)
Log in to comment