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Tobias 1099~2Y
I'm finally getting around to this 10 days late because making a decision about this is the most gruelling of chores! But thanks for helping out with that!

Chances are a lot of the choices I have here are far more powerful than what I need - I mean the relatively ancient computer I'm currently using still handles most of what I do without much issue - but the limits of my knowledge mean that I can either choose the biggest numbers and hope for the best, or rely on the decision of someone more knowledgeable. I've also been holding off making a decision since I'm hardly rolling in cash, so finding something cheaper but still sufficiently powerful and future-proof would be ideal.

I'm wondering whether having two 2TB SSDs - one for most of my work, the other for additional space if I need it - might work best. Storage space is at least something tangible to me and something I have a better idea of my needs for than all the other parts.

Going through your the parts you specifically mentioned:

I know next to nothing about CPUs, but the 7 and 3700 seem significantly lower than 9 and 5900, so would that be sufficiently future-proof, or might I regret not getting something more powerful in a couple of years?

The website I linked to in the post doesn't seem to have ASUS Dual RTX 3070 as an option (unless I'm missing it; my eyes glaze over when looking at the long lists of technical names that aren't meaningfully different to me). I think it has ASUS Dual RTX 3060 though?
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MontyCallay99~2Y
No one can tell you what you need to be sufficiently future-proof unless you know what the issue is with your current setup vs your needs. My Dad, who mostly needs his PC for general business work, upgraded his seven year old laptop a few years ago with an SSD and it works fine for him until this day.

If it's "just" your hard drives, then getting a PC with equivalent parts to the other ones you have now will probably last you at least few more years as it is, unless for some reason in the future your needs drastically change. If you want a slight upgrade, you could just look at what you have right now on a ranking (e.g. [LINK] ) compared to other parts and consider something on that basis. Then you can get a sense of if you need a 3700 or a 5900 etc. This is how you can build an understanding of these things, picking hardware isn't rocket science! GPU-wise, I would also consider using a standard design (one of the ones without a name other than "NVidia GeForce") as opposed to one that's been overclocked and overhauled with custom coolers out of the box, which you probably won't find necessary and makes it more expensive.

What you'd need to upgrade to improve your experience isn't even particularly difficult to find out, if you can find a situation where things aren't performing adequately you can check the usage of your components at that time with the task manager. If my hunch that the hard drive is mostly the issue is correct, then that allows you to pick parts on that basis. Similarly if the CPU is the limiting factor etc. For the little time that will take, surely that is superior to having to listen to folks guessing at what you need and you preferring to pay the maximum out of uncertainty!
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Tobias 1099~2Y
I'd say the creative stuff I'm doing all day every day is heavier than general business stuff, and Task Manager often shows me that my CPU or Memory are at 100%. Plus I get frequent lag, programs take forever to load up (though it's usually worst in the mornings), the computer itself needs about half an hour to start up and almost as long to shut down, and sometimes it just briefly freezes, or crashes entirely (that's like a once-a-month thing though). It just generally feels old or clogged up; 'tired'. That could just be me personifying in my ignorance and PCs don't work that way, but I find it hard to believe that running one all day every day for years wouldn't wear it out in some way or another.

Oh, and occasionally I want to play relatively modern games, but a simple Lego game I got recently barely ran at all because it used something like raytracing, I think? I forget. It'd be nice to have something that could run modern stuff on the rare occasions I'd like to.

I checked that comparison site, but again it's just a bunch of code names and numbers, and I don't know what any of them mean so it's basically the same "so I should go with the biggest numbers?" situation as just comparing their names. I don't have a clue what numbers would be sufficient for me.
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MontyCallay99~2Y
Great, that's valuable to know!

A lot of these figures on hardware comparison sites act more like heuristics for comparison, especially benchmark scores. GPUs are easier because, when lost, you can refer to real-world benchmark scores (gaming speeds) whereas how much you get out of your CPU depends much more on how you use it.

I remember that you had some kind of quad-core i5 processor? One thing to keep in mind is that increasing number of cores doesn't necessarily mean increasing your performance, since some programs and tasks only use a single core, which is why the single core performance metric exists and is relevant. In the unity forum ( [LINK] ) the consensus seems to be that Unity, for instance, mostly benefits from single-core performance. So it might make sense to get an 8-core rather than a 12-core, given an even single-core speed. I would probably revise my recommendation after seeing the single-core improvement on the 8-core Ryzen 7 5800X over the 3700X, and getting the 5800X over the 12-core 5900X still saves you >100£ for what is, as I gather, the same single-core performance. So that seems like a good compromise!

Memory issues are annoying, but it's comparatively cheap and you're getting plenty of it, so that's great as well!

As far as I know, the performance of components itself doesn't actually significantly wear over time unless something goes wrong, and then they'd be "broken" rather than "old", which is why the used parts market exists. There's a good description here: [LINK]

So the start times are probably related to your drive speed, and reinstalling the OS from time to time also helps to mitigate a lot of bloat-based slowdown and crashes, but that's probably not something you want to deal with at this point!

Enabling ray-tracing in most titles that support it is, as far as I know, optional, and will cost you a ton of performance even if you have a GPU that can do well at it, which afaik yours (a 10-series, I think?) doesn't, since it was made before ray-tracing even was a thing. So I'd consider maxing out your GPU as optional, since you're not the person to go for maximum graphics settings on everything etc. Comparing GPUs is vastly easier. Look up benchmark performance and the settings they use (and remember that you have a 1080p monitor). So while a 3080 has, on paper, apparently about 35% better performance than a 3070 ( [LINK] ), it's unlikely you need that performance for 1080p gaming, considering that for that Lego game, benchmarks ( [LINK]&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de - this is supposed to be a single link, I don't know what's going wrong here, just paste the rest in as well I guess) show that even a (last-gen!) RTX 2070 as well as a 3060ti are completely sufficient to run the game at an average of above 60fps with ray-tracing on, which is the maximum refresh rate of most monitors. You'd probably be just fine with a 3060ti or 3070 even for games that come out in the future, as long as you're not looking to max out all of your settings.
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