Bottleneck measures the machine, ranks what is holding it back, and shows you what to change — with the reasoning in plain sight, so you can disagree with it.
Task Manager tells you what is busy right now. Benchmark suites give you a number with no opinion attached. Neither answers the only question that matters: of everything in this machine, which part is the one costing you time, and is replacing it worth the money?
Detects the hardware, runs short benchmarks on CPU, memory, graphics and every drive, and checks drive and laptop battery health. No install required — it will run from a USB stick.
Scores each component against what current parts of its class actually achieve, using a reference dataset that updates as new hardware ships.
Sorts what it found by how much it is costing you, and shows the fix for each — settings first, hardware only where settings will not do it.
Every finding carries a severity and an explanation of what it is costing you, not a bare score.
Each finding says what to change and how. A restrictive power plan is a setting, not a purchase.
Where hardware genuinely is the limit, it says which part and what the change would buy you.
Scans are kept, so you can see a machine degrade rather than guess whether it used to be faster.
Export a printable HTML report readable by someone who has never seen the application.
On Technician and above, every machine you have scanned side by side, with the estate’s trend.
There is no account and no telemetry. Results are written to your own disk and stay there; the only way one leaves the machine is as an anonymous summary you have to switch on yourself.
The reference dataset, the list of licences withdrawn after a refund, and a notice when a new version is out — none of it carrying anything about the machine: no hardware details, no results, no identifier. All of it can be switched off, and the application works without it.
That dataset drives purchase recommendations, so it is signed. Tampered data could push you toward buying things you do not need; a dataset that fails verification is discarded.
Your key is verified on your own machine against a public key compiled into the application. No activation server, so nothing to phone home to and nothing to go dark.
Licences are perpetual. The version you buy keeps working forever; only the entitlement to new versions lapses, after a year. An update plan to keep receiving them is optional, and renews yearly until you cancel.
A tool that overstates its certainty is worse than no tool, so here is where the edges are.
Expected scores come from published relative performance, anchored to measured hardware. For common parts this is close. For unusual configurations it is an estimate, and the application says so rather than presenting a confident number it cannot support.
Scans take minutes, not hours. That is the right trade for a diagnostic you will actually run. For sustained load there is a separate heat and stability check of up to an hour, though a dedicated stress-testing suite left running for many hours can still catch rarer faults.
Windows 10 and 11 on x64. There is no macOS or Linux build, and none is planned — most of what it does reads Windows-specific configuration.
An offline licence can prove a tier but never a count. Machine allowances are licence terms shown in Settings, not a lock. We would rather trust customers than add friction that punishes the honest ones.
Start in your browser. Each guide works without Bottleneck — though Bottleneck will tell you which of them apply to your PC.
Choose a processor and a graphics card to see which one holds your games back at 1080p, 1440p and 4K, and why.
A slow PC usually has one or two causes that cost nothing to fix. What to check first, in order: background programs, startup apps, storage, memory, power and heat.
Windows times every start and records what made it slower. How to read that record, and what to do about each cause.
Short freezes usually mean memory ran out, the drive could not keep up or the processor was flat out. How to tell which, and fix it.
How to find which program keeps the drive busy, the usual causes in Windows 11 and 10, and the fixes that last.
What different kinds of use need, how to check in Task Manager whether your PC runs out, and what to know before adding more.
A graphics card at 50–70% while a game runs slower than you want is waiting for something. The causes in the order worth checking.
Windows records how much charge the battery holds compared with when it was new. How to read it in two minutes, and what the numbers mean.
The free tier scans, benchmarks and scores, with no time limit.