TShirt_Ninja

Hardware encoding really has such a light load on the CPU that I don't think it's going to be the deciding factor in this situation. Though if he went with the Ryzen CPU, he could probably start using software encoding (for the better image quality) since those 8 extra threads on the 1600 would be pretty capable of handling that. So I think that's the core decision he needs to make. If he plans to stick with hardware encoding, then there's really no relative difference between the two.

You probably want something like two of these. Do you know what kind of display inputs the TVs have? Most likely you'll need proper adapters to adapt the mini-Displayport outs on the GPUs to whatever inputs the TVs have. It may also take a little bit of configuration work, but this is probably the cheapest method to do what you want.

You probably want something like two of these. Do you know what kind of display inputs the TVs have? Most likely you'll need proper adapters to adapt the mini-Displayport outs on the GPUs to whatever inputs the TVs have. It may also take a little bit of configuration work, but this is probably the cheapest method to do what you want.

Watch this
 

At longer lengths standard High-Speed cables may not handle full HDMI 2.0 speed.

no
 
thats illegal and against the rules

The vast majority of headsets marketed for gaming have mediocre or poor build quality, comfort and sound quality and bad sonic properties for gaming, especially FPS gaming.
I have HyperX Cloud (which is sonically the same as Cloud II and CloudX), and I do not recommend it because it has a small soundstage, bad imaging and it sounds very muddy. Soundstage is how well distance to sounds is portrayed and imaging is the location of sounds across the soundstage. A much better option is Superlux HD668B with velour earpads from HiFiMAN; the headphones have a big soundstage and good imaging, clarity and detail retrieval. Another option that I see people recommend for gaming is Philips SHP9500. As for mics, you have Massdrop Minimic and V-Moda BoomPro. The BoomPro isn't compatible with HD668B.
 

I have some bad news for you: the 960m is a weaker GPU than the 660ti. Mostly because the 960m is a mobile, significantly cut-down card compared to the full desktop 960. If you can get a laptop with a more recent Pascal GPU, you would have much better luck, as that generation of Nvidia cards basically got rid of the mobile variants, so you'd get much better gaming performance for really not much higher cost.

Probably not, if I were you I would use NVENC to do the encoding on the GPU instead of CPU.

You're welcome! I have considered doing the same thing, but ended up deciding against it for the time being due to the complete lack of TB3 cables longer than 6 feet, when I need just a little bit more length than that.

Personally, if I was investing in TB3, I'd go with the add-in card in order to get it all in to one cable; it's just that little bit cleaner for really very little extra cost, especially since the Thunderbolt EX3 card is only like $40 and is compatible with even my relatively inexpensive ASUS Z170-A motherboard. 

Here's the really hard part about all of this: if you have a discrete GPU (which I would assume you have), you have to have a Displayport in port on the motherboard that would then mix that in with the TB3 signal. And while there are three motherboards that have built-in TB3 ports, as far as I can tell, none of them have that DP-in that would allow the TB3 port to send anything other than video from the iGPU on you CPU through the TB3 connection. So really, if you have a PC with a discrete GPU, and you want to run everything through one cable, you're going to need to go with something like the Asus Thunderbolt EX 3 on one of the compatible Asus motherboards (thankfully there are quite a few of these), since that expansion card *does* have the required DP-in port to allow you to use your dGPU through the TB3 connection.

Thunderbolt 3 PCIe cards still need to have a Thunderbolt 3 header on the motherboard, and since TB3 is definitely an Intel-proprietary standard, there is, and very likely will never be, any possibility of having TB3 on an AMD CPU, at least any time soon.