magnaton wrote:When talking to the tech guys there, it seems the A/C power cord is the only thing I have that can be transplanted from my current system!
Partly because of the above and partly because it costs more to perform incremental upgrades, I now have a policy of just building a new machine when I need some more capability. My old HW machine then becomes my general purpose machine and my old general purpose machine is, ideally, sold off but more likely given away or scrapped.
Consequently, my i5 (2500 no "K") with 32GB will remain in operation until I need more RAM for a new sample set - unless it fails in some way, of course.
The main issue I saw was that because technology advances so quickly, by the time you are ready for an upgrade everything else has been superseded as well. For instance, RAM is now often DDR4 and not DDR3. RAM speeds can be faster so there you will only benefit from a faster CPU if you upgrade that as well. New mother boards frequently have sockets for the faster SSD disks. Old mother boards may not work properly with the latest operating systems.
So I just make a system then run it until i have to upgrade for some real reason. Then I spend days finding a set of compatible components that are cheap. I usually pick a CPU that sounds promising from here:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net. (Then when I discover that I have picked an unusual and outdated server CPU, I revise my decision!) Then to find compatible mother boards I look here (I presume the US has some similar sites):
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/ Once you have a mother board you can start looking for compatible memory.
That usually has to be iterated to find the cheapest, reasonable speed, solution. If you always want fastest then expect to pay inflated prices. My first rule is to get at least twice as much memory as previously and a processor that is at least twice as fast.
I hope this helps,