The switch from a mechanical HDD to a SDD was the biggest gain in performance I've seen from any piece of hardware. I still remember the time when HDDs were the norm and the agony of waiting on loading/accessing something from disk was real.
I get a chuckle out of colleagues who ask for copious RAM today, and while I'll usually show them where they can put money to do what they actually need better, this kitchen analogy suffices for most of their use cases:
The hard drive, RAM, and CPU are like the fridge, the prep table, and the stove. In the days of high storage latency and low throughput mechanical storage, it took a few weeks to gather ingredients from the fridge and bring them back to your prep table, so it made sense to buy the largest prep table you could afford to save yourself the trip. However, your stove only had one or two burners, so you were still waiting around for one thing to finish cooking one thing so you could move on to another.
Today, high bandwidth, low latency storage like NVMe means you have an always-on instantaneous portal to the ingredients realm so there's no real need for the extra-large prep table. It's usually better to spend the money on more burners for the stove so you can keep it as busy as possible and get the most work out.
It's a vast over simplification, but I can't help but sigh when someone says they literally cannot do their job without 64GB of RAM and then choose a quad-core or some low-power series laptop.
Industry dependent, of course. Desktop processers are getting more and more parallel, and more cores requires more ram. I have a 32 core Threadripper in my workstation with 128GB RAM, and on full compiles I still OOM. My next upgrade to this machine will be 192GB.
> Your skills from 20 years ago will serve you well: download the manuals for the motherboard; they're more accurate than the specs listed on any other website.
In ye olde times we didn't even had google, and the web was pretty empty. I had to buy the parts by shopping around in my neighborhood.
As the other commenter pointed out, pcpartpicker is the way to go. My method was to find the CPU, chassis and amount of ram I wanted, enter them into pcpartpicker and pick out the test of the components with their help for compatibility except ram. When it came to ram, the motherboard providers have a list of "officially supported" sticks, down to the model number. I went through that list checking reviews and availability and ended up with some g skill ram.
This isn't 2010.
https://www.airforcemag.com/fix-my-computer-cry-echos-on-soc...
If only i did it with a larger drove though... Im atruggling through my system drive on a 90gb ssd...