The 970 has been pretty good, although I like some versions better than others (Asus is my fav so far but I hate doing the mod for it. The Gigabyte has been successful for at least four customers I know of and supposedly fits OK without adjusting the DC power jack).
One thing I found just this week is that Heroes of the Storm actually can stress your system more than furmark and prime95 (in terms of heat and power draw) because of a bug that blizz needs to work out. I have one customer who is experiencing that problem now, and I'm trying to get to the bottom of it but from the amount of complaints it seems to be a fairly common issue with the Nvidia 9 series having the majority of the complaints.
No scientific data yet on it...just something that shocked me as his system was stress tested for THREE DAYS with benchmarks, the first day being Prime95 + Furmark. No issues and passed. He gets on Heroes of the Storm and BLAMO. Resets power brick towards the end of a match. Keeps happening too, and the system gets stupid hot. Really weird. It hasn't happened with any other game in his library though. it's silly because HotS shouldn't really be a demanding game at all.
Enough with that ranting. My only real concern is that I have never used a CPU with a wattage over 65. Some of my customers have, but I think 65 is the limit. I don't know how one would cool a 80w CPU and the Xeons I've worked with don't like to be undervolted.
I actually have some experience in streaming, and most of the encoding/broadcast suites do take really good advantage of multicore CPUs (particularly Wirecast, Livestream, and vMix) but if he is planning on gaming on the same box, then I personally would consider Skylake anyways, for the strong primary core. If you were JUST streaming then I would downgrade the GPU to a 750ti and keep the Xeon. Would you be using like a Magewell M.2 HDMI capture card or something?
I have one customer who is a pro gamer and streamer (Street Fighter) and she is using a 65w CPU and a 285 ITX.
