Almost 2 months ago I posted here with a question about a GPU upgrade. I got some awesome answers (thanks again everyone!) and ended up doing a couple of upgrades at once, and now have a much better system! I went from

Zotac Gaming GTX 1650 (4GB) > Gigabyte RTX 3060 (12GB)
16GB (2x 8gb) > 32GB (2X 16GB) DDR4 RAM
500GB WD Blue M.2 NVME SSD > 2TB SanDisk EXTREME M.2 NVME SSD
2TB Seagate Barracuda > 8TB Seagate Ironwolf PRO HDD

I didn’t end up upgrading the CPU, so am still rocking my Ryzen 5 3600. I’m not super happy with its performance in certain games, particularly the more CPU intensive games like Transport Fever 2 (with large, well developed maps), and NIMBY Rails, but I can hold out for now. All of my roomates moved out, so I’ve also taken the fairly ugly approach of running CAT6 ethernet cable down the hallway and under my door to my PC, so I’ve got a nice internet speed boost as well. This isn’t permanent though (planning running proper cabling underneath the house in the coming months).

With a good dusting, and a new application of thermal paste, my PC is now feeling quite snappy and runs a lot better. I’ve been thinking about the upgrade path, and I think next year I’ll make my final upgrade to this system and upgrade CPUs to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, as it’s currently considered to be the best (at a reasonable price) AM4 CPU on the market. Then, hopefully, I can rock this system for a fair few years before needing to upgrade again. I may possibly upgrade to a 40 or possibly 50 series (if the 3060 needs an upgrade by the next upgrade time) GPU prior to switching over, even though my components likely won’t be able to take full advantage, just so that it’s one less thing I’ll need to buy when I take the next big leap (afaik there’s no upgrade path after a 5800X3D, and switching to am5 will require a new motherboard and ddr5 ram)

When the time for another upgrade does come, I’m strongly considering building my own system. This was a pre-built, as I’m not very confident in messing around with it. Through reapplying thermal paste, and the upgrades I’ve done to this system, I’ve learnt the basics, and think that a quick YouTube tutorial should be able to get me through the rest.

Thanks once again everyone for all the advice, it was very useful!