I was using a u12-a on a 14900k. Throttled out of the box at 5.7ghz.

Underclocked to 4.8ghz to keep temps at 80-85c under sustained load.

Put a Liquid Freezer ii AIO in last week and now I can push clock up to 5.3ghz and get the same 80-85c under sustained load.

Haven’t tested fps in games or anything, but the added 500mhz feels nice :)

If you’re talking about gaming, I can’t imagine a case where one would bottleneck the other. Games known to clobber a GPU don’t even seem to care what CPU you have (Alan Wake 2 eats my 3090 for breakfast and barely even knows I have a 14900k in there).

Likewise for games that are CPU-intensive. I don’t know which. I’ve heard Baldur’s 3 and several 4x games eat CPUs. But the GPU requirements are generally low on those games.

tldr: I don’t think bottlenecking is a really big deal anymore in gaming. Games tend to eat one and ignore the other.

Anecdotally, same for professional data analysis applications (when we’re not using a VM, anyway). Most applications I’m used to just devour my GPU and leave my CPU alone.

Check the underside of your cooler’s block to make sure you took the plastic off before you installed it.

Are you limiting the clock at all? Out of the box with a Strix Wi-Fi Gaming II, Turbo was on by default.

In Cyberpunk, clock speeds for me were regularly up at the 5.7 GHz turbo max.

And temps were bouncing off of that 100c limit frequently. I have a Noctua u12-a cooling it.

I’m wondering if a 360 AIO is really that much better than a u12-a at keeping the 14900k cool. That would blow my mind.