Just watched the AMD AM5 product release and am very pleasantly surprised at the MSRP pricing of the stack.

Can't complain about the Ryzen 9 7950X retail MSRP pricing of $699.

That is $100 less than the launch price of the Ryzen 9 5950X. Cheaper and better performance all in one generational uplift.

Assume the aggressive pricing of Alder Lake by Intel had something to do with the pricing. Gotta love manufacturer competition for benefiting the consumer.

I can tell you that right now that my system is now usable while running 8 Einstein Gravitational Wave Search tasks on the CPU (4 cores with HT) which I've seen use as much as 2GB for a single task. Before the upgrade my my GUI would freeze up if too many simultaneous Einstein Gravitational Wave Search tasks ran and used up all my available RAM. At this point I'd have to connect to it from another computer to suspend Einstein to restore responsiveness. With some projects such as Rosetta, some tasks are paused if there is not enough available RAM. I could have set resource limits in BOINC but I'd rather be able to use the full computing power of my CPU.

I checked the system monitor a few minutes ago and 87% of my 16GB is being used.

mine for example ... 3984635 and screen ^^

I've never done an upgrade specifically for BOINC before and I've always thought that if I did it would be a CPU or GPU upgrade.

A few days ago I did my first ever BOINC motivated upgrade: more RAM.

I think a page like https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/List_of_projects_by_system_requirements would be useful if it was updated !

4th - I am puzzled at how you know what the memory requirements are for individual projects, such as what you spoke of. While I don't think I'll be running Rosetta any time soon, how would I know what the memory requirements are for Einstein and/or Milkyway? Is there something that I can look up? ...or is there a formula I can use?

Projects (ideally) have a FAQ or link or blurb on their join up page that spells out their system requirements (OS, CPU, RAM, GPU storage etc). Unfortunately in many cases it's matter of looking in their forums for people posting about issues they are having and seeing what the responses are. Or dealing with issues as they crop up after you have joined (or both).
Less than ideal.

My current rig has an i7-990X processor (yes, 1st gen Intel)

Actually 1st generation Intel CPU would be the 4004, but the first of the current generation would be the 8086 (where we get the x86 from in present CPU/software designations).

2. AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU - $738 (Amazon & Newegg) 16-core/32-threads

Better yet is the 3900X, at least from a price point of view.
Here in Australia
Ryzen 9 3900X $35 per thread
Ryzen 9 3950X $45 per thread
If you have workloads that can make use of the extra cores & threads, then it is worth the extra price. If not, then it's not. And if you don't need the number of cores & threads the 3900X provides, the 3800X or even the 3600X would be the way to go.

Noctua NH-U12A CPU Cooling Fan (w/2 fans)

I don't know how things are priced over there, but here for the price of one those Noctua's, you can get a damn good AIO (All In One) water cooler unit.

32GB G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3200MHz (w/CL14) memory

Depending on what projects you plan to run, with that many cores that won't be nearly enough RAM. eg Rosetta has Tasks that require 1.3GB of RAM, they will soon be releasing Tasks that may require up to 4GB of RAM.
If you were to run Rosetta on that system, and wanted to usal all cores & threads, for the 3900X you'd need 64GB of RAM (and that's a bare minimum for that CPU- even then 128GB might be necessary under certain circumstances) and for the 3900X 128GB of RAM (the amount required even at the most likely worst case would be less than that, but you need to use matching capacity/timing /brand modules to avoid issues, and for best memory performance).
So you'd need to decide how many cores & threads you will gt, then lok at projects you are interested in & see what their maximum RAM requirements are, and add RAM accordingly.

Yes, it would be nice to have a pre-order availability list for each vendor. They have done that in the past, but didn't for the 3900X. You can put a AlertMe notification on a product at Amazon for example. But it has to be listed first. Since the product embargo won't lift until the official November 25th release date, no way to get an early warning on availability. There is also the NowinStock.net website that can automatically look for product availability across multiple vendors. Updates can be fast or slow though. By the time I had notification from that site for a vendor, the product was already out of stock again. Still another tool to use.
https://www.nowinstock.net/

George, do you have an inside line or scoop on scoring your Ryzen 9 3950X? Or are you just throwing out your fishing line into the distribution channel and hoping for a bite? I suspect the availability will be just as bad as it is for the 3900X.

From my personal experience, if you are like I was and have 0 (zero) knowledge on Linux, and wish the less possible headache with Boinc installation and running, go for the Ubuntu 18.04 builds + TBar AIO. Well known and easy to get support, just in case, on this forums.

I’ve yet to see a single person have a better experience moving to Linux Mint than just using Ubuntu.

99% of the time it’s the opposite. If you’re moving to Linux, you need to learn the “new” way things work no matter what OS you choose. Many people have this idea that Mint is “Linux Windows” but it’s not, and you’re likely to face strange issues and frustrations. You’ll be much better off going with Ubuntu 18.04, so when you have issues it’s much easier for you to get help.

Either change to Windows7, backlevel to driver version 431 or change to the 8.16 SAH application.