Anyone successfully installed a new motherboard and CPU without reinstalling Windows?

Richdog · 2025-02-03T16:16:10+0000

Hi all. historically I have always followed popular wisdom and 'best practise' and performed a clean install of Windows when changing mobo and CPU.

However I am curious... has anyone here successfully upgraded without reinstalling Windows eg: just uninstalling the motherboard drivers, installing the new hardware and then rebooting?

I will be switching from X670 to X870 soon and was thinking about trying it as a lazy solution to avoid re-installing all my stuff.

Tetras · 2025-02-03T16:17:36+0000

Richdog said:
has anyone here successfully upgraded without reinstalling Windows eg: just uninstalling the motherboard drivers, installing the new hardware and then rebooting?

I've done it without doing anything at all, Windows is pretty resilient now.

fizzy · 2025-02-03T16:30:13+0000

Yes, done this a few times. Only ended up reinstalling windows from scratch last time when I switched from an Sata SSD to an M2 SSD. If it's similar tech to the old machine (Amd to Amd, Intel to Intel etc) there shouldn't be any issues, but if not you may have to clean up redundant drivers etc once it's running in new machine.

The other issue is windows licensing - generally windows registers licence online against the motherboard serial number or other hardware identifiers, so if you transfer the drive to a different machine you may need to buy a new license and reactivate windows.

Armageus · 2025-02-03T16:34:42+0000

Richdog said:
I will be switching from X670 to X870 soon and was thinking about trying it as a lazy solution to avoid re-installing all my stuff.

I wouldn't even bother uninstalling any drivers - they both use the same chipset package. Only thing worth having to hand is the driver for your network card (but unless it's a slightly more obscure 2.5Gb or whatever then even that's probably unnecessary).

My current work PC install has moved from Intel 7xxx to Ryzen 4xxx and currently on Intel 14xxx with no reinstall

nlel1975 · 2025-02-03T16:35:56+0000

I had issues with my 7950X3D after swapping motherboards and CPU, it worked but the CPU had some issues in OCCT and I wasn't getting the correct score from the CPU in Geekbench. So I did a fresh install and that solved everything. So while it worked its better to do a fresh install when changing motherboard and CPU.

Sparx · 2025-02-03T18:04:46+0000

Done it many times now, not as problematic as it used to be years back.

Richdog · 2025-02-03T18:16:14+0000

Thanks everyone that gives me some reassurance! Anyway I will just try it and see what happens, worst comes to worst i can do the reinstall.

Armageus said:
I wouldn't even bother uninstalling any drivers - they both use the same chipset package. Only thing worth having to hand is the driver for your network card (but unless it's a slightly more obscure 2.5Gb or whatever then even that's probably unnecessary).

My current work PC install has moved from Intel 7xxx to Ryzen 4xxx and currently on Intel 14xxx with no reinstall

Thanks for the tips. The mobo im installing has a 5GB ethernet port, but both mobos are MSI so it should be fine.

Interesting that you wouldn't uninstall the mobo drivers... I assume it would be good to install the latest AMD chipset drivers in advance though as mine are likely a bit old now.