An update on my planned retirement from hardware upgrades...

With me working again now after my heart transplant earlier this year, I am getting back into the upgrade game. I am well set on my current GPUs, but now I want to update/upgrade my CPU platform on my main PC (which still has the i7-4790K from five years ago) by this Christmas.

I am thinking about either an AMD Ryzen 3000-series or an Intel i7 or i9-9xxx series. And I will be planning to purchase a new motherboard, new RAM and one new m.2 PCIe SSD with this upgrade.

When that's done, I will move my GTX 1060 to this refreshed main PC and move the 1050 Ti to my mini-PC.

Oh, boy... The cycle never ends!

Randall

I did a PPBM test with the GTX 1050 Ti, and compared it to the GTX 1060 - both in the same i7-4790K PC overclocked to 4.7 GHz:

MPEG-2 DVD (MPE CUDA on):

GTX 1050 Ti: 37 seconds

GTX 1060: 24 seconds

H.264 Blu-ray (MPE CUDA on):

GTX 1050 Ti: 111 seconds

GTX 1060: 91 seconds

Although this performance difference looks big on paper, it actually amounts to very little in real life. As a matter of fact, the GTX 1050 Ti performs about equal to the Kepler-generation GTX 660 when it comes to HD-to-MPEG-2 DVD rendering/export performance (and this in spite of my particular GTX 660 being a factory overclocked card while the particular GTX 1050 Ti that I chose is clocked at reference clock speeds). However, like most other Pascal GPUs, the GTX 1050 Ti is faster in H.264 Blu-ray exports than most of the Kepler GPUs. And despite having only 768 CUDA cores and an effective CUDA memory throughput of 105.6 GB/s (compared to 960 CUDA cores and an actual CUDA memory throughput of 144 GB/s in the Kepler GTX 660), it actually outperforms the 1,024-CUDA-core Maxwell GTX 960 (with its effective CUDA memory throughput of only 96 GB/s) in all of my GPU-intensive tests - and this despite the GTX 1050 Ti being clocked at its reference clocks while the GTX 960 was heavily overclocked at the factory that manufactured the card.

And while the GTX 1060 is still more powerful than the GTX 1050 Ti, the 1050 Ti may be a better fit for lower-end PCs with eight or fewer CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM (a typical configuration for such mainstream PC builds).

And by the way: The problems with the GTX 1050 Ti came largely from those people who bought massively factory overclocked cards - and that can, and in some cases does, cause problems in Premiere Pro CC and other CUDA productivity apps.

Randall

I can't be of much use, but I like the way you are thinking. I'd like to do a big new build, but the options are just mind-numbing. And more than once, I've headed down the road of beefing my i7 930, RAM 24GB, GTX 760 (2GB VRAM). So far I still have CUDA.

The best thing I've done is to add SSD (not M.2 since my system won't support it).

But my system is behind your ITX, and anything I might do would be wasted toward any future build.

A real dilemma.