I feel old and rusty by asking

[Getback]

Don't know about current ones but mATX also used to be of thinner materials. For sure ATX has more space around components to allow better cooling.

Good point!

[hazmatt]

Usually a CPU upgrade won't make much of a difference especially in older games that don't utilize a bunch of cores.

I had a system with 12100/1070 with a quest 2 that I upgraded to a 4070 super. I got a good boost in performance but the internet and all the bottleneck calculators said that my 12100 was bottle necking the GPU by a massive amount so I upgraded to a 10700. The performance difference was minimal.

Most of the older games are not going to benefit from a bunch of cores that they can't utilize. Based on this if I were in the market for a CPU (and that's really what you need and not a better GPU) I would look for the best single core performance for the price.

Games like AH3 IL2 and WT are not going to use all those extra cores even if you spend the money on them. I can't speak about DCS as I'm not familiar with it, however I suspect like IL2 that even though it can use more then one core that the bulk of the processing runs on one thread.

[icepac]

Don't forget to check "per core" when reading performance specs since some processors have a bunch of weaker cores making "performance numbers" hard to decode.   

I'm still using a 555 X2 black edition processor with "X2" meaning sold as 2 core processor but was able to get all 4 cores up and for about 10 years but it's back down to 2 cores now and time for a new rig.   

[AKIron]

Don't forget to check "per core" when reading performance specs since some processors have a bunch of weaker cores making "performance numbers" hard to decode.   

Intel did that but I've read they won't be doing it again. AMD never did. There are some workarounds for the Intel core issues.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/bitsun-coredirector-intel-cpu-e-cores