My 2017 hardware refresh/upgrade question, Part II

[RjL190365]

Hello again,

After my relocation to another residence, I have been using only my older generation i7-4790K/GTX 970 tower system, and have my mini ITX newer generation (i7-7700/GTX 1060) system now in storage. I now intend to keep the mini system in storage for parts or a spare lower-spec system, and decide to just upgrade parts in my tower PC instead.

I do not want to spend a lot of money with this upgrade/update (I had spent too much money for component upgrades earlier this year).

Here are my current choices:

1) Simply retire my tower system's current GTX 970 and move the GTX 1060 from my mini breadbox PC to my tower PC.

2) Move the GTX 1060 from my breadbox to my tower, buy a new motherboard (most likely an H270 or Z270 chipset model) for my tower PC, and move my i7-7700 and 16GB of DDR4-2400 RAM from the breadbox to the tower.

3) Move the GTX 1060 from the breadbox to the tower, buy a whole new platform (more than likely an AMD Ryzen) for my tower, and buy new RAM for it.

Of those three choices, which would you recommend? If you recommend choice 3) above, then which platform would you recommend? Or, which of those three choices would give me the most performance improvement for the buck? I would really appreciate your responses.

Randall

[RjL190365]

Yesterday evening I decided to simply move my GTX 1060 from my mini-ITX system to my tower system, replacing my GTX 970 in the latter. In my tower system (with the CPU at its default turbo-boosted clock speed) my results with the GTX 1060 came out almost exactly equal to the best results that I had achieved with the GTX 970. Here are the specifics:

"78","24","101","524"

where:

Disk I/O: 78 seconds

MPEG-2 DVD (MPE on): 24 seconds

H.264 Blu-ray (MPE on): 101 seconds

MPEG-2 DVD (MPE off): 524 seconds

I did this switcheroo only because the Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs suffer from a serious bug with its Hyperthreading, where executing certain operations would cause the system to lock up, reboot or shut down when hyperthreading is enabled (the temporary fix is to disable Hyperthreading in the system's firmware). The new Skylake-X CPUs also suffer from this bug, but the less desirable Kaby Lake-X CPUs have the problem fixed.

[RoninEdits]

the hyper-threading issue was supposedly fixed with motherboard bios updates a couple of months ago.

[RjL190365]

Unfortunately, the motherboard my i7-7700 is on (GA-H170N-WiFi) has not received a BIOS update since this past March, which is the latest BIOS version that's currently available on Gigabyte's US web site. It mentions nothing at all whatsoever about the code fix -- just "improved stability".

By the way, the hyper-threading bug also affects the i3-6xxx and i3-7xxx CPUs, as well as the Pentium G4560. It does not affect the current i5 CPUs such as the i5-6500 and the i5-7600K, which have hyper-threading disabled at manufacturing level.