I think 424 is the most stable v16 version, but cannot remember at the moment what got fixed in that release. YMMV. It's a painless install, and takes only a few minutes.

I'm certainly with 16 for the immediate future, but one way or another, I do have to get better performance across the board. I'm keeping as many options open as possible while I do a serious cost/benefit rundown. I'll probably take the specs you posted (thank you once again), try to translate them into a 4k context, and see what my costs look like. I'm mostly doing amateur drone videos, so I'll stay in 4k for the duration.

@Widetrack - Very wise indeed.

@Widetrack There's a benchmarking thread in these forums a few pages back that has benchmarks that indicate playback speed, render time, etc. for a number of system configurations. That is what I used to make recommendations with in the other thread. Take a close look at those to get a good idea of what responds well to Vegas.