Well this sucks, 16% to me isnt worth the cost, work & potential risk of something going wrong in the update. I can't believe how sensitive my PC is in updating &/or changing stuff, ridiculous really.
I can't argue on the cost/benefit case for you.
But as to the risk, I'm surprised, it's not been my experience for quite a few years now, very unlike the "good old days" of Windows NT or Unix, when hardware changes were much more trouble.
I've just done another round of upgrades, where three systems got the CPUs swapped around, a chunk of 128GB RAM got split into two and finally one 5950X got replaced by a 7950X3D with new DDR5-5600. The others were one Ivy Bridge i7 and one Kaby Lake i7 with 32GB DDR3-2400 each being replaced by two 5800X3D with DDR4-3200, while currently retaining a GTX 1080ti and an RTX 3070 on a THD and a 3k display respectively, the big system runs an RTX 4090 on 42" @4k with up to 144 Hz variable refresh via a dual DP KVM.
That meant all mainboards, CPUs and RAM got swapped, dropped, added or somehow moved, all GPUs remained, some storage transformed e.g. from SATA RAIDs to NVMe but generally stayed in place for an illusion of "personality" permanence.
Most were Windows10, some also dual boot to Windows 11, others have one or two extra Linux variants they run, e.g. Proxmox, RHV/oVirt or just RHEL8, Fedora 40 or Debian 12.
Most of my systems really have gone from Windows 7 via 10 to 11 with every piece of hardware replaced several times without problems but I keep those mostly lean and mean. The two smaller systems in this swap were from my kids, who run games with lots of complex patches and they really do not appreciate a fresh install.
Whether I swap the hardware or upgrade the Windows OS, as long as I don't do both at the same time, it's hardly ever been more than one or two reboots, extra drivers for RAID, extra sensors or power mangement. LAN and WiFi tend to require driver updates, but I always keep some really generic USB NIC around to download drivers I forgot to copy into a local folder before.
The nicest surprise is really things like Intel software RAID boot drives surviving even on AMD boards or easily being transplanted onto NVMe drives. A 10 year old Paragon disk manager license still just gets the job done, while a TrueImage from 2016 tends to complain about hardware changes but currently seems to accept them again (that was broken earlier this year). I use both to create backups one some big chunk of spinning rust, because that is a lesson I learned early more than 40 years ago now.
The biggest bother with Windows is licenses. While my OS use MAK keys, Office and various other applications would like to charge extra and it can be a bit of a bother to reactivate them.
With Linux I usually have to fiddle with the network setup since it's no longer just /dev/ethN. Sometimes blacklists need updates for GPU passthrough etc. it's generally a bit more involved but manageable as long as GPUs aren't changed.
I don't do storage transplants quite as often on Linux, because it typically self-contained on swappable SATA or USB-SSDs, but these days even ZPOOLs tend to re-attach or migrate as long as you take care to manage versions and features correctly.
Was it worth doing?
Well, for the first time ever Microsoft's flight simulator no longer sucks on an RTX4090 using an HP Reverb VR headset.
Since gaming isn't the primary mission, that system used a 5950X before.
In case you don't use VR for FS: All your plane windows basiscally become screens and the outwide world view is being projected on them. And with that you have two rather de-coupled updates streams. Your head movement means the plane's inside need to reflect your movement and that's been fast enough for a long time. But the outside scenery viewed through the windows need to update, too, and in the past that's often been really stuttery perhaps even below 20 Hz, completely killing the illusion of flight, even if the head perspective is updated at 90Hz or better.
Instead the illusion is that of sitting in nice big commercial airplane simulator that just happens to be broken...
Evidently all that requires more horsepower than just driving a 4k display and I couldn't be sure if that was a CPU or a GPU bottleneck.
To me a flight simulator without VR makes no sense at all, so essentially it was a dud for years.
Swapping the 5950X for a 7950X3D did the trick for me, frame rates aren't always perfectly smooth for outside world view, but good enough to create the illusion I was aiming for.
I can't say how much of that improvement is due to 3D V-cache or the higher speed/IPC, the RTX 4090 and storage remained the same.
Of course now I just notice more just how badly Microsoft is generating the "ground truth": Unless you're in an area with hand digitized buildings, the generated stuff is completely wrong in building styles and the generated ground activity like cars moving around is totally nonsensical, cars going around in circles, driving into buildings or rivers, appearing and disappearing in the oddest manners etc.
Can't really beat the uncanny valley only move it.
Every other game I've tried also runs pretty smooth now, ARK ASCEND is the next most demanding title in my library and there with DLSS frame rates generally fall somewhere between the 60 - 144 FPS my 4k monitor is capable of.
Would a 5800X3D have been good enough?
For gaming, quite possibly. But again, that's not the use case which pays for the machine. And for that stuff the extra cores were just more important.
I took a bet on the 9950X3D not coming out until next year and jumped for the 7950X3D instead. So far I have no regrets and an upgrade should be doable, if I need those extra few %.
it's the TDP power I currently use.
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