A system will always have a bottleneck somewhere. In a sufficiently powerful system, you may never notice. If you do encounter a bottleneck, it's probably one of 3 things: Your CPU (Processor), GPU (graphics card), or your RAM. Other components, like your hard drive can also become bottlenecks for large file transfers or when launching games.
The easiest way to tell what component is bottlenecking your system is to check for disproportionately high utilization using Windows Performance Monitor. Bear in mind that the component bottlenecking your system while using one application, may not be the same bottleneck as encountered by another application.
1. Open Task Manager by right clicking on task bar at the bottom of your screen.
2. If your Task Manager opened in simplified view, click More Details in the bottom left corner.
3. Click the Performance tab at the top.
4. Once on the Performance tab, watch the CPU and GPU utilization.
5. Look for a component running at or near 100% while other components show significantly lower utilization.
- For example: In the image below, while transferring a large file, disk utilization reached 100% and prevented the transfer from accelerating, while other component utilization was around or below 50%. In this case, upgrading to an SSD would have removed the bottleneck.
