The proper way to evaluate a gaming PC

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After years of always having the model of "last year" and thus suffering small but annoying lag in 3D games, I want to ensure that I get a top notch model that can play this year's games with -no- lag.

What are the critical factors?

  1. 3D graphics card. Looking at GeForce GTX cards (780 in particular).
  2. The RAM.
  3. The HD (SSD)

But I understand after reading online (and playing games for years) that it's not only the 3D graphics card, but the bottleneck that has to be identified.

So, how do I find this bottleneck when evaluating new computers?

hard-drive


Best Answer

Different games have different requirements and therefore reveal different bottlenecks.

Graphics: If you have low framerates and lowering the graphics settings returns you to high framerates, you may have a graphics bottleneck. If you do opt for a beefier graphics card, be sure your powersupply can handle it.

CPU: If you can play the game in small conditions, but performance degrades into larger conditions (where more is happening, but not more showing on the screen), you may have a CPU bottleneck. Test this with different map sizes (Civ5 - old), different player and unit counts (Starcraft2 - old).

Memory: If you are using virtual memory at all, you should probably get more memory.

Network: This resource doesn't depend on the computer. There are many out of game tools to use. speedtest.net can show you at the moment what your network is like. Can you stream down to your computer, how many streams (find the limit)? Can you stream up from your computer, what quality? Also consider if your home network is shared and that part of the bandwidth may be diverted to other computers.

Most bottlenecks are between these 4 resources.



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How do I know how good my PC is for gaming?

Windows has a built-in diagnostics tool called Performance Monitor. It can review your computer's activity in real time or through your log file. You can use its reporting feature to determine what's causing your PC to slow down. To access Resource and Performance Monitor, open Run and type PERFMON.


How to stress test a PC to find errors and crashes



More answers regarding the proper way to evaluate a gaming PC

Answer 2

Personal experience tells me that, in PCs used for gaming, the graphics card is usually the bottleneck. This is because games are not very CPU/HDD/Memory intensive as much as graphically intensive.

For gaming (as a rule of thumb) you should spend as much as you can in the GPU (GTX 780 and similar are very good), then if you have 8 GBs of RAM, a good Intel i5 processor and an SSD with high read speeds you are good to go (even though you could go for a quad core i7 if you plan to stream while playing).

If one of your components doesn't match these rough guidelines, than that component is likely the bottleneck of your system.

I would put the components in this order:

  1. GPU
  2. CPU
  3. RAM
  4. HDD/SSD

Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Images: Soumil Kumar, FOX, Max DeRoin, Pixabay

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