determining bottleneck

[jslater25]

I've tried to find out how to determine what is bottlenecking my computer, however my Google-fu apparently is weaker than I thought.

Rather than continually coming back to here and asking someone to provide information to me (I'm window shopping for new hardware... so I don't have a small set of hardware I want to look at just yet), I'd prefer to better understand how to find this information.

How do you determine the limiting factor when building a new computer?

 

[Dangman]

Depends on what exactly you're gonna be using the PC for.

 

[jslater25]

Good to know. I would have thought that a bottleneck would be a bottleneck, regardless of what is being done.

For this particular time, I want to have a better gaming rig. I believe that CPU and GPU will be the two primary places to look, followed by RAM and perhaps HDDs. Gaming will be the primary use for the computer, followed by photo editing.