While waiting on the windows key, i started thinking about overclocking my AMD FX 3600 to not just only squeeze a bit of performance out of this computer before going over to the next one in a week or two, but also learn about this in general so in the event if i wanted to do it, i can do it on my new one, even though my new CPU goes much faster. Up to 110% (3.85 Ghz)
Specs in case you don’t know: AMD FX 6300, 16 GB DDR3 2000mhz(?), NIVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060.
With that said, while calculating the bottleneck on the PC builds website because i do want to smooth out any hiccups or spikes and such, for both 100% and 110%, i have taken a look at the results here:
| Res |
100% CPU |
110% CPU |
| 1080p |
31.11% |
24.38% |
| 1440p |
19.77% |
15.06% |
| 2160p |
12.90% |
9.48% |
The bolded part is what PC builds considered to be good.
And here’s the links to these two calculations here to confirm what i have said here. 100% CPU, and 110% CPU.
Is this correct here what i’m seeing? That to get lower bottleneck of the CPU, i need to go from 1080p to 4K? 
As you increase resolution the GPU spends more time doing things. As a result the CPU has more idle time while it waits for the GPU to finish.
It’s like two guys planting trees: one is digging holes, the other is putting saplings in them. The guy with the saplings can only go as fast as the guy digging holes, since he can’t plant where there isn’t a hole. Increasing the resolution slows down the hole digger, so the planter catches up quicker and has more idle time.
It’s obviously not exactly like that, but it’s close enough in this case for the purpose of discussion
I’m genuinely curious what criteria PC Builds uses for “good” loads. Anything under 16.7% on that CPU will mean no core is fully loaded, thus has headroom left for spikes. But it’s also possible to go much higher than that without overloading any single core.
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Bottleneck calculators are useless.
FX will bottleneck any modern graphics card at any resolution. Even at 4k.
Even the fastest CPU will be a bottleneck sometimes, or even often, depending on several factors.
This concept is a dynamic one that depends not only on hardware configuration, but games, resolution, settings, and specific conditions within the game at any given time.
If you can max out the usage of your graohics card most of the time, and your performance when CPU limited is acceptable, then I’d say you’re okay.