How should I benchmark my system's performance after an upgrade?

Run real tasks with your heaviest project or application—time how long it takes to load, process, or export before and after the upgrade. Synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench or Geekbench mostly test CPU and GPU speed and won’t show RAM capacity improvements unless you were already hitting the wall. Use your normal apps like Photoshop, a big spreadsheet, a VM, or a dev environment, and time exports, tab reloads, or compile times.