Upgrade Strategy; z97 platform to z170 worth it?

[mazjohn]

I currently have a fully working system under El-Capitan using the previously popular Gigabyte z97m-D3h motherboard (socket 1150 build)

My question is;

Would it be a good future proofing measure to upgrade my motherboard and CPU to the latest Z170 socket 1150?

I want to upgrade to MacOS Sierra, but before upgrading, i'm wondering if it might be better to ditch the z97 for the latest socket motherboard.... is it worth the hardware upgrade to move over to the newer chipset? on top of this, Kaby Lake CPU's are coming soon, so I am confused about what strategy I should use currently, being that I am still on the older Z97 socket platform...

Appreciate any thoughts as to proper strategy !!!!

 

[Fl0r!an]

Skylake was not a huge improvement over Haswell, and Kaby Lake won't be either, so performance-wise there's little reason to upgrade, your Haswell rig will serve you well for the next years. As far as I know 100-series mainboards won't support Cannonlake, so it won't be a lot more future proof either.

Besides that it's always fun to start a new build, so... why not?

 

[trs96]

Probably best to stay with your Haswell build at least two more years. There's no significant advantage to running macOS Sierra on a Skylake system.

What are you using it for ?

 

[kiiroaka]

Would it be a good future proofing measure to upgrade my motherboard and CPU to the latest Z170 socket 1150?

No. If anything it's a step back because of the speed of RAM. If you want to upgrade I'd install max RAM, 32GB of probably DDR3 2400, upgrade the CPU to i7-4790K, and upgrade to the fastest GPU when it becomes supported in OSX. For the time being, you may want to buy a new SSD for Sierra, instead of over writing El Cap; which will probably mean a size upgrade from your present SSD, so you might as well get the best one you can.

Sierra review: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/09/macos-10-12-sierra-the-ars-technica-review/ page 7 reviews APFS.

Unless it can be proved that the Z97 won't support APFS I wouldn't be in any hurry to replace/upgrade the Z97 mobo.