ATI/AMD based motherboards

[dfour]

I have a asus a8r32-mvp (ati RD580 based) S93 based motherboard at the moment and have just recieved my asus M4a79 deluxe (790FX).

Has anyone got any ideas if I can just switch the motherboards over without doing a clean install ( I know that is the best option) and not have it all go FUBAR???

[Giraffe]

I have changed between Asus boards and just uninstalled the old drivers and installed the new ones; still running after 21 months.

Just back up everything!

[Pob255]

Answer, Sometimes but even if it does appear to work there can be issues.

While as Giraffe said, uninstalling the drivers, turn off, swap motherboard, boot, install new drivers, reboot.
Should work, but not always, windows has the bad habbit of not actually deleteing drivers but squirreling them away just incase. And then reuseing them for the new motherboard for which they may be incompatible or may not work very well, windows will of course automatically use them without asking and when you try to install new ones it will happly let you but still keep running the old ones.

I have it work, totally fail and just decide to reasign all my hard drives into a different order which was a total pain to sort out.

Back every thing up and try.
If it fails or you get problems, then it's reinstall time.

[Sputnik]

If you want to be 100% error free I think you should do a fresh install. Probably not what you want to hear.

[mac124]

On the grounds one is socket 939 and the other is AM2 then no you cannot just swap the motherboards, you will need a new cpu too.

Or am i missing something??

[dfour]

If you want to be 100% error free I think you should do a fresh install. Probably not what you want to hear.

This is what I expected to hear and was my first reaction. Its just a pain as I reinstalled 2 weeks ago

On the grounds one is socket 939 and the other is AM2 then no you cannot just swap the motherboards, you will need a new cpu too.

Or am i missing something??

LOL I have a 939 rig at the moment and a am2 rig just waiting to be built. This is about using the same instalatioon of xp from one MB to the other, (both asus and both amd chipsets).

Thx for the replies I will set it up and see what happens.

[Blaineoliver]

There was one motherboard that was a 939 that could be changed to AM2 with a adaptor card. Doubt its still around though.

[DanceswithUnix]

Not tried this with AMD chipset motherboards, but I often swap around Nvidia chipset motherboards and as long as you don't mind going through half a dozen reboots whilst the plug & play sorts itself out all seems OK.

In my case I update to the latest Nvidia motherboard drivers, making sure both models are covered by the driver set, and then do the swap.

There are gotchas, like going from a motherboard with ACPI disabled to one with it enabled causes problems for Windows as it likes a different kernel. Using motherboard RAID can also tie you to that motherboard.