Help determining system bottleneck

Hey all,

I've been noticing some slowdowns on my ~3 year old system, and am looking to replace whatever components I need to, but I want to know how to identify which part is slowing my system down the most.

Applications take a little too long to load, and I notice stuttering in games (Grand Theft Auto V and The Sims 3). I think these issues could easily be caused by any component being outdated, so I want to know what the best way would be to identify a bottleneck in my setup. I've used the Task Manager to monitor performance and received results that were not particularly useful.

Here are my system specifications:
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500k (LGA 1155)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
Memory: 4GB (x2) Corsair 1600MHz
Graphics card: EVGA NVIDIA GTX 570
Hard drive: 1.3TB Samsung 5200 RPM

In my opinion, my hard drive needs to be replaced by an SSD, but I'm not so sure it's the root of all of my stuttering and slow-downs. My graphics card is also aging, but obviously that wouldn't explain my slow applications.

Any ideas? I appreciate any feedback and would be more than happy to provide further information. Thanks much for the assistance!

I personally think that your amount of ram (2 sticks for 4gb ram) is quite low for big games like GTA V.
If your motherboard can handle 8GB-16GB of ram, I suggest upgrading it. Also, just in case you don't know the true meaning of bottlenecking, I suggest you watch this to get a better understanding of it:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DAgpvWc4VBM

(I'm posting the video for educational purposes ONLY. I am in no way affiliated with JayzTwoCents)

I hope this helps!

MCPlayer18 said:

I personally think that your amount of ram (2 sticks for 4gb ram) is quite low for big games like GTA V.
If your motherboard can handle 8GB-16GB of ram, I suggest upgrading it.

Click to expand...

Hmm, I never thought of that; My machine does seem to get close, but never maxes out, on RAM usage. Since RAM isn't too expensive, I'll definitely look into purchasing more.

Still, would my problems be caused by my slow hard drive and/or benefit from an SSD?

Is this a 32 or 64 bit OS? You should update the system specs to show this.
If 32 bit 4 GB RAM is the limit, even if your hardware will support more.

Yes. You WILL benefit from a SSD. Especially a 256GB-2TB one. If I were you, I would use hybrid storage. SSD for the OS and HDD for storage like games and folders.

And LMiller7 is correct. Although, I thought that the 32Bit maximum was 3GB not 4GB. But 4GB does seem right.

32 bit client versions of Windows have a 4 GB RAM limit. This is a license limit enforced by the kernel. But due to address space sharing not all of this 4 GB is available for RAM. Depending on hardware roughly 3 - 3.5 GB will be available. If RAM is used by the video system this will be further reduced.

LMiller7 said:

Is this a 32 or 64 bit OS? You should update the system specs to show this.
If 32 bit 4 GB RAM is the limit, even if your hardware will support more.

Click to expand...

Sorry, I guess I wasn't totally clear: I'm running a 64-bit OS, which supports my 8GB of RAM.

MCPlayer18 said:

Yes. You WILL benefit from a SSD. Especially a 256GB-2TB one. If I were you, I would use hybrid storage. SSD for the OS and HDD for storage like games and folders.

Click to expand...

That is my plan. I think I'm going to get a 480GB SSD and couple it with my 1.5TB drive.

Thanks much for all of the advice, and if anyone has any further suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Next obvious one would be GPU, that processor can feed much better one without problems. Processor can take some OC if you are so inclined.