Aligning Performance Between Components

[David (PassMark)]

The best mix of hardware should depend on your usage. If you are doing just EMail and web browsing, then any old GPU will do fine.
If you are running a database then RAM and disk speed might be what is important.

But for disk, CPU & GPU, the numbers are somewhat comparable.
e.g. A score of 20,000 in CPUMark, DiskMark and 3Dmark will be fairly well balanced.

[Arbix]

Can anyone provide any guidance on how best to align performance between RAM, HD, CPU, and GPU? For example, suppose I have a GPU that gives me a benchmark of 10k with a CPU that benchmarks at say 1000. Obviously, I wouldn't see very good performance on the machine because my CPU is a tremendous bottleneck. If my aim was to get comparable benchmarking #'s from each component, would that mean that the machine has no bottleneck?... i.e. each component is well matched to each other component, or should I not look at the benchmarking #'s across components in that way?

My guess is that the benchmarking #s are good only relative to that component, comparing CPU1 vs CPU2 etc., but then how could I determine if performance levels across components are well matched?



Thanks in advance,
Arbix