- Joined
- Dec 14, 2010
It means to slow down your computer or hold it back from reaching its full potential.
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2GB stick, but PC only reads 1GB
- Thread starter gate4exec
- Start date
It means to slow down your computer or hold it back from reaching its full potential.
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2012
- Location
- Phoenix, Az
think about bottlenecking as this...
In the end your PC is only as fast as the "slowest" part... if you have a small ammount of ram you limit the ammount of data your CPU can utilize at any one moment. Ram is the fastest form of memory, far faster then a SSD or HD or DVD or Flash drive... however, if you can only hold a small ammount of info in it at once, then your pc will be limited by the read times of your mass storage devices, as it will have to continuously load from them into the ram, which then will take the info into the CPU...
If you have a lot of ram, the PC can preload all the info your CPU might need, long before it calls for it, and as a result you'll notice almost no load times excepting when you open a new program or something that's not preloaded.
In short small amounts of ram will drastically BOTTLENECK (a bottle's neck being smaller then the rest of the bottle, so it slows down the liquid pouring out of it) your system, forcing your CPU to wait for data to be pulled off your mass storage devices, basically slowing your system to a crawl.
In windows XP, you'll notice some bottle-necking at system ram sizes smaller then 1.5gb... at sizes larger then that you'll notice little to no bottle-necking from the ram. (windows 7 is a different beast all together, and generally speaking you'll need 3+gb of ram to avoid significant bottle-necking)
In the end your PC is only as fast as the "slowest" part... if you have a small ammount of ram you limit the ammount of data your CPU can utilize at any one moment. Ram is the fastest form of memory, far faster then a SSD or HD or DVD or Flash drive... however, if you can only hold a small ammount of info in it at once, then your pc will be limited by the read times of your mass storage devices, as it will have to continuously load from them into the ram, which then will take the info into the CPU...
If you have a lot of ram, the PC can preload all the info your CPU might need, long before it calls for it, and as a result you'll notice almost no load times excepting when you open a new program or something that's not preloaded.
In short small amounts of ram will drastically BOTTLENECK (a bottle's neck being smaller then the rest of the bottle, so it slows down the liquid pouring out of it) your system, forcing your CPU to wait for data to be pulled off your mass storage devices, basically slowing your system to a crawl.
In windows XP, you'll notice some bottle-necking at system ram sizes smaller then 1.5gb... at sizes larger then that you'll notice little to no bottle-necking from the ram. (windows 7 is a different beast all together, and generally speaking you'll need 3+gb of ram to avoid significant bottle-necking)
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