switching to intel. what to do?

jimbaw · 6 Mar 2014 at 16:21

I wasnt sur where to put this so let me know if it's the wrong section.

I've put my gigabyte 990fxa ud5, my amd fx 8350 and a gtx660 for sale because I'm thinking of switching to the dark side of the force (intel) and I wanted to know if I could just plug my ssd back in, install the new mobo drivers and then be done or if I needed to do a full clean install.
I've got a back up on my hdd so would I need to change that as well.
Cheers

gpuerrilla · 6 Mar 2014 at 16:23

It is always recommended to do a clean install but some success has been noted that it has worked without changing drivers. Windows may want activating if a hardware change is detected and sometimes a call is in order.

Josh · 6 Mar 2014 at 16:24

Do a full clean install, nothing nasty left behind then. Thats my advice

jimbaw · 6 Mar 2014 at 16:29

Ok it's what I thought then just checking if being lazy would work haha.
It won't be strainght away anyways since I doubt that I'll manage to sell anything on gumtree quickly enough but I'll see. Cheers guys

Confused Stu · 6 Mar 2014 at 16:30

While you MIGHT be able to get Windows to boot after an AMD to Intel based system swap, in my experience it won't be easy and Windows won't be very stable afterwards. I've only done it a couple of times following motherboard death and needing to get data from the HDD before reinstalling.

I know it will take some time and cause inconvenience to install a fresh Windows following the motherboard change, but it really will save a lot of time and hassle in the long run as you won't be chasing down bugs/driver issues/BSODs that will almost certainly result if you don't.

I know other people have probably had success re-using the same Windows install, but from my experience it's just not worth the risk.

EDIT - Must type quicker, two replies came in as I was replying!

jimbaw · 6 Mar 2014 at 17:22

Haha thanks. I'll just transfer all my data to an external hard drive and do a fresh install on both drives then.

DELETED_83755 · 6 Mar 2014 at 21:41

I went from a Phenom II x4 955 to i7 2700k straight swap and also installed the nvidia drivers without removed AMD GPU drivers. Worked fine. Windows 8 detected the new hardware, had to reactivate the copy and away I went. Easy as pie.

ALXAndy · 7 Mar 2014 at 10:09

I don't see any mention of what OS you are using so I will assume that you are using Windows 7 yes? given it's the most popular OS..

Going from AMD is always going to be tough, as the drivers and patches and so on that you need for them to work correctly is usually always down to the CCC. As such AMD drivers tend to remove anything else.

I had an issue a couple of weeks back where the AMD driver removed the basic USB driver and the AMD USB driver leaving me with no USB.

Even if it did work you would need to spend considerable time making sure the Intel drivers were all on, so I would go with a reinstall. Switching out motherboards has always been very hit and miss and even when it does work there are no concrete guarantees Windows is addressing your hardware properly.

Kei · 7 Mar 2014 at 12:02

Just moved from a phenom II x4 955 to an i7 4820K myself and also from a radeon 6950 to a GTX780 without reinstalling windows 7. All i did was to strip off the original drivers via device manager and uninstalled the software before dismantling the system. Then I did the hardware swap and booted it back up and made sure to set the bios up prior to first boot. Worked perfectly and i haven't had a single issue, all i needed to do was reactivate windows due to "significant hardware changes". You should always backup anything you want to keep off the OS partition just in case anyway as it's never certain if it'll work perfectly like it did for me. If it works then it's time and effort saved, if not, you can just reinstall.

jimbaw · 7 Mar 2014 at 14:58

cheers for sharing your experiences guys. yes I do have windows 7.
if I do happen to ever have the cash to change, i'll do a clean install
thanks again

DELETED_83755 · 7 Mar 2014 at 22:37

ALXAndy said:
I don't see any mention of what OS you are using so I will assume that you are using Windows 7 yes? given it's the most popular OS..

Going from AMD is always going to be tough, as the drivers and patches and so on that you need for them to work correctly is usually always down to the CCC. As such AMD drivers tend to remove anything else.

I had an issue a couple of weeks back where the AMD driver removed the basic USB driver and the AMD USB driver leaving me with no USB.

Even if it did work you would need to spend considerable time making sure the Intel drivers were all on, so I would go with a reinstall. Switching out motherboards has always been very hit and miss and even when it does work there are no concrete guarantees Windows is addressing your hardware properly.

Was Windows 8.1. Extremely painless. Also had the secondary HDD with games and bigger apps installed and windows configured everything correctly.

alex_123_fra · 8 Mar 2014 at 00:25

teddy3578 said:
Was Windows 8.1. Extremely painless. Also had the secondary HDD with games and bigger apps installed and windows configured everything correctly.

I doubt this describes the experience most would have. Any sane PC user will say back up important data and do a clean install. This gives your os and PC the highest chance to work correctly and at optimal speeds.

Windows has the ability to upgrade automatically and "configure" itself when going from win7 to win8. Would I recommend it? No, I'd still perform a clean install.

Boomstick777 · 8 Mar 2014 at 09:56

alex_123_fra said:
I doubt this describes the experience most would have. Any sane PC user will say back up important data and do a clean install. This gives your os and PC the highest chance to work correctly and at optimal speeds.

Windows has the ability to upgrade automatically and "configure" itself when going from win7 to win8. Would I recommend it? No, I'd still perform a clean install.

Agreed, any big changes to your system and would recommend a full clean install.

DELETED_83755 · 8 Mar 2014 at 10:18

Surely if it works fine, it is an added bonus. I made backups and put time aside for a full reinstall but I managed to go from Windows 7 with an AMD cpu + Nvidia GPU to AMD gpu then upgrade my install from Windows 7 to 8.0 then 8.1 then moved to Intel CPU + NVIDIA gpu.

Many big changes to the system and windows hasn't caused any issue. There is no reason not to try it with the view to doing a reinstall if not happy.

almighty15 · 8 Mar 2014 at 11:59

As long as you don't have a RAID array you should be able to swap without a lot of issues.

jimbaw · 8 Mar 2014 at 12:16

I was really just wondering if it were possible to use the lazy approach. it doesn't take that long to reinstall anyway and i'll just back up my data beforehand.
I can't see it happening anytime soon anyway with the interest i got on my ad so far.
might as well wait for broadwell and z97 (or go for haswell when it's cheaper).

almighty15 · 8 Mar 2014 at 12:30

Or buy a Z77 system for even less.

I paid £165 for my 3770k from another forum and it clocks to 5Ghz.... chuck in a motherboard from the B-Grade section and you could have a very cheap yet fast Intel system.

robertchalmers1 · 8 Mar 2014 at 13:07

My best mate runs a pc shop locally to me and at least twice a day does major upgrades to pc, sometimes as many as double figures and unless the customer is willing to pay for a fresh install or upgrade his copy of windows if need be then he uses the method of swapping over hardware and re activating windows IF need be. He says ever since w7 he has never had any compatibility problem that can't be resolved software wise

pastymuncher · 8 Mar 2014 at 14:17

I would still do a fresh install. There is going to be a lot of unneeded crap left on the drive otherwise. There's also the fact that i would be paranoid and always wondering if i could have got even more performance by doing a fresh install.

If for a SSD use the software tool to do a factory reset (or is it secure erase?) for max performance too. I forgot to do that on my last install and lost a chunk of performance. Did a reset followed by another install and got it back.

alex_123_fra · 8 Mar 2014 at 20:23

pastymuncher said:
I would still do a fresh install. There is going to be a lot of unneeded crap left on the drive otherwise. There's also the fact that i would be paranoid and always wondering if i could have got even more performance by doing a fresh install.

If for a SSD use the software tool to do a factory reset (or is it secure erase?) for max performance too. I forgot to do that on my last install and lost a chunk of performance. Did a reset followed by another install and got it back.

Agree. To use a slightly imperfect analogy, if I heavily modified/upgraded my car's engine, I could still use the same ECU map that was there before and the car would still run, but it would run like crap. Fuel economy would be worse and power would not be optimal for the setup. If pushed to the rev limits through the gears, it could also be fairly dangerous to the engine (a point which isn't that relevant to PCs). So I'd choose a remap to suit the new setup.

In PC terms, yes the system would likely work and you wouldn't see conflicts or question marks in device manager but are you getting optimal performance? Unlikely. Even on my work computer (I work in healthcare) we all recently upgraded to Haswells from Sandy CPUs and the techs just imaged the hard drives and stuck them in the new systems without a clean install. To my mind, it was a total waste of time as there are a lot of aspects of office functionality that are actually SLOWER now since the "upgrade" and it is purely down to techs wanting to take shortcuts. Granted it takes longer to do a clean reinstall on all PCs but in productivity terms, in my mind, it is worthwhile.