I spent six years with an entry-level pentium CPU (G4400) in my main (and often only) computer. I also did not use a SSD. It really did make me appreciate pro

I spent six years with an entry-level pentium CPU (G4400) in my main (and often only) computer. I also did not use a SSD. It really did make me appreciate programs that make do with less. Moving to a 6C/12T Ryzen with a SSD was amazing, I couldn't believe how quick everything was. Even invoking thunar was appreciably faster, I had no idea I'd been using a "slow" system before. The Pentium went through a lot; I threw everything I was interested in as a student at it. It even did some 24+ hour encoding jobs, some NN training and some Wii emulation and Wine gaming. Moving to a faster computer with a SSD only really sped up the gaming parts. 95% of my time is spent in my text editor / browser / terminal, and they only really benefit from the SSD, not from higher clock speeds / more cores. Compiling software is much faster, but I don't do it often enough with programs large enough for it to matter. My desktop never did overheat, though. My laptop doesn't go under 50C without an external cooler. Hardware support for video codecs is a good reason to upgrade.