[SOLVED] Upgrade advice needed

[eco_bach]

My 4 year old custom build works fine but am considering upgrading 1 or more components. My budget is $2000Cdn and want my PC to stay relevant for at least another 5 years!
My work involves primarily 3D applications (Houdini, Maya, etc) and working in Unreal Engine.

This is my current build

1. Motherboard ROG Zenith Extreme 399
2. CPU AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16-Core Processor 3.40 GHz
3. Water Cooler Swiftech H240
4. GPU 2x Nvidia Volta
5. RAM Total 64 GB
6. EVGA 1200P power supply

I don't do a lot of Redshift GPU rendering and no SLI so unfortunately I rarely take advantage of my dual GPUs.
Should I consider upgrading my CPU only? CPU + Motherboard or?
What would you recommend?

My water cooler seems to work fine but haven't changed coolant or done any maintenance since purchasing.
Should I make this a priority? ie if I don't ever clean and change coolant can I expect a performance decrease due less cooling performance?
Thanks!

 

[geofelt]

In what way is your current setup not doing the job?

Yes, more modern processors are much more capable.
Your budget allows for the best possible.

A change in cpu will likely involve a motherboard change also.

One way to compare processors is to look at the passmark ratings.
For example, your 1950X has 32 processing threads and a performance rating of 27873. That is when all 32 threads are fully busy.
The single thread performance is 2291.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadripper+1950X&id=3058

How much does the performance of your apps depend on how many processing threads you have?
You can get an idea if you run some tests and disable some of the 32 threads you now have.

You can get an idea as to the relevance by looking up "amdahl's law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

At some point, the single thread performance becomes very important.

In the amd world, an upgrade to a Ryzen 9-5950x would still give you 32 processing threads, but the newer architecture is about twice as capable.
The passmark rating of the r9-5950x is 46172/3500.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?id=3862
It sells for about $650 US$

For about the same price, the Intel I9-12900K has 24 threads and a rating of 40158/4201.
If you can effectively use 32 threads, the 5950x is better.
If you have a significant single thread component, the threads on the 12900K are considerably faster.
Run a simple cpu-Z bench test and look at the single thread performance score.
If all is running normally, you should see about 459.
https://valid.x86.fr/bench/s3428m

No need to change coolant unless you see your cpu temperatures higher than normal.
If you change processors, I would expect that kits will be available to handle any mounting issues.

Likely whatever ram you now have would be ok if it is ok now.