I'd have to wonder - on a new PC, is hibernate actually going to be that bad? I'd figure with the speeds of modern RAM and SSDs, it'd probably only take a couple of seconds to fire up?
So far, in the few days I have tried it, hibernate is comparable in speed to shut down. Both are not as fast as standby/sleep, but they both take about the same amount of time to get to the Windows screen. As you know, shut down is the safest of all the options, but it's also the slowest in that all programs you had opened before are closed and so you're not picking up where you left off.
my best PC is 6th gen i7, DDR3 RAM, SATA SSD. Apparently, a current-generation Ryzen 3 would outperform it - probably getting towards time for an upgrade then!)
Yea, you're definitely way long overdue for a new machine. The latest current generation of processor chips is 10th gen. I can't say for sure that AMD chips are better than Intel, as I have always had machines that use Intel processors, but based on what I have read online, AMD beats Intel in the lower end with, say, i3 and i5, but Intel starts excelling over AMD at the higher end with the i7 and i9 even though they tend to not be as expensive. Also, as we have already discussed, definitely get a machine that uses the M.2 NVMe form factor for the hard drive. Much smaller and much faster than SATA.
A few months ago, I debated with myself for a really long time whether or not to upgrade my year old Surface Pro 6 to a Surface Pro 7. Design-wise, they're essentially identical except for the addition of USB C ports, meaning you pretty much cannot tell a 6th gen Surface apart from a 7th gen one just by looking at it. There are some differences in the architecture, though. The 7th gen uses a 10th gen processor, while the 6th gen uses either a 7th or an 8th gen processor (I don't remember). Now that I have made use of my 7th gen Surface for about a few months, I'm so glad that I ended up getting one even though there's not much difference being the successor of the 6th gen. The upgrade to a 10th gen processor makes a huge difference performance wise. It's much faster. Even though it heats up very quickly just like the 6th gen device when I'm playing Candy Crush, it doesn't speed throttle, or slow gameplay to the point that it's unbearable to even play. In all the times I have played CC on the Surface Pro 7, I still have never encountered speed throttling. I also went from 8GB RAM to 16GB RAM with the 7. I figured that if I'm going to get a 10th gen processor, I might as well double the RAM too. Hard drive capacity is the same, I went with 256GB of storage for both devices. I don't really plan to use the tablet much for gaming, mostly for work/future schooling. Also, it is capable of using Wifi 6 with the ax protocol, while the 6 can only use Wifi 5.