What needs more cooling, CPU or GPU?

[MyNameIsPhill]

So, I need help deciding how to upgrade the cooling with my set up.

I have a R7 5800x with a CoolerMaster Hyper 212 and a Sapphire Pulse 6700xt. I am running near 165 fps in most titles at 1440p at 165hz.

My case (Corsair 4000x) has a 360mm aio front panel. Currently my plan is to get a 360 aio for my cpu and hopefully overclock it.

 

I have two questions.

Will overclocking my cpu get me more consistent 165fps or am I bottlenecked by the gpu?

If my gpu is the bottleneck, would watercooling it with a 360mm aio make sense?

 

PartPicker

[SavageNeo]

for 1440p your gpu is likely the bottleneck (mayby ram if only 16gb), but watercooling it wont help. it can get little higher clock speeds, but wont really help at all.

[YoungBlade]

If your aim is to get higher FPS and you're okay with doing some tweaking, you can often get noticeably smoother framerates by dropping a few select settings and then capping your FPS to the desired amount. Sometimes you honestly can't tell a difference between two visual settings, but one loses 10 fps compared to the other.

 

Hardware Unboxed used to regularly do per game optimization guides. If you happen to play one of those titles (RDR2, SotTR, AC, Metro, and others) you could give those settings a try, or at least watch a few to see what common settings are just performance drainers: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7m5C6_P_lnXQhO8YRLfVVMSGo0UwDIne