Motherboard / CPU Upgrade

[Attila the Bun]

Morning all,

A quick question to the floor. I am changing my gaming rig from AMD to an Intel based system and am swapping out the Motherboard and CPU.

Essentially, will I need to reinstall Windows 7 64 bit (retail version).

I've done a bit of trawling through the net and results are about 50/50 with Yes vs No.

Has anybody done this particular upgrade before? Did you have any problems?

Thanks in advance.

AtB

[DanceswithUnix]

You might be lucky, you might not.

I don't like to trust to luck, so personally I just re-install on a motherboard swap as I expect in the long run it will happen at some point anyway.

[Attila the Bun]

Is it a good idea to wipe the SSD first, then assemble and reinstall...or could I assemble and run from Windows disk.

[Lil-Diabo]

I've had success by uninstalling every device I could from device manager and then restarting after it was all done.
I think there was a slight issue with AHCI vs IDE mode.

But honestly as DanceswithUnix above said, you're better off backing up all your information and going with a clean install

[DanceswithUnix]

If you do decide to just try it, I would be tempted to do an image backup of the ssd first as smallish hard drives are pretty cheap an useful to have around anyway.

Win7 seems better at this sort of thing than XP ever was, so there is a chance it will just work.

Edit to add: Hmm, you are probably going from an old BIOS to UEFI as well which may add to the excitement

[Attila the Bun]

I already have it in AHCI mode.

I think, given that I only have the OS and some regularly used programmes on the SSD...everything else being held on a separate HDD...I think a complete reformat followed by assembly followed by OS install is probably the way to go.

Although if I'm not going to do any damage I may try to do the straight swap first.

What do you guys think?

[Ttaskmaster]

I went from an FX6350 on an MSI 970A-G46, to an i5 3570K on a P8Z77-V LX and had absolutely no problems whatsoever.
Just the usual changes in settings, a few drivers and that.

But for best results, a reinstall is always good.

[Toadem]

From what I can remember from Win 7 on it became easier to change out hardware and have it recognized on boot. I remember Win xp was particularly temperamental in this regard and even changing from an athlon to an athlon II required a reinstall of windows. Last year I changed out my MB, RAM, PSU, CPU and GPU at the same time (essentially a rebuild) and Windows kicked in first time from an existing drive although I was going from an Athlon II to an FX8350.
On a side note I recently did a new build for one of my kids and used a second hand HD (installed with Win 8.1 the seller forgot to format, and people wonder why they lose their identity) that came from an intel system and put it in his AMD build and the OS booted with no problems at all.

[Bonebreaker777]

I vote for reinstall, it doesn't take long. 10-20min on new systems.