The 970 GPU is brilliant for the price. It's what I upgraded to last year and it's a great upgrade. I posted the upgrade test results somewhere at the time. It tripled the performance in most games and some games like Dirt 3 actually hit an upper FPS limit which is mad.

Regarding Windows 10 Pro. As you concluded avoid home as it's missing some very useful stuff such as very good built in virtualisation. Home also has all the new m$ data collection and spyware active from install, whereas pro has it disabled.

Regarding memory crash issues. Especially during boot time. This is normally old drivers and launch bar programs running. It can also be older win 7 GPU drivers. Mine has been pretty stable on all 4 systems I'm running 10 pro on.

Oh and I didn't have to buy an official 10 pro licence for any of them. I had an 8.1 licence so upgraded that on a clean install for my main gaming rig. For the others I just had pirated windows 7 ultimate installed on them made genuine via windows toolkit. These all upgraded perfectly ok to 10 pro and therfore are now all official licences. I don't quite get the upgrade trouble you've been having.

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