Upgrading Processor and Motherboard for Windows 11 (or 12)

[Rob 63]

Hi,
A question from a total newbie. I'm looking to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 (or maybe Windows 12 if it's out by then), before next year's October date when MS support is cut-off, on a PC that was put together for me back in 2013 as a Windows 7 or 8 (I don't recall which) machine and that I had upgraded to Windows 10 Pro in 2022.

Some basic details of my PC:
ASUS x64 system
Intel Core [email protected] Processor (which I understand is 4th Generation)
ASUS Z87-C Rev1.xx Motherboard
8GB RAM
Samsung 500GB SSD

When I used Microsoft's PC Healthcheck App to see if I could upgrade to Windows 11, there were 2 reasons preventing it: (1) TPM 2.0 was not detected; and (2) My processor won't support windows 11.

I've done some reading online and understand it's not just as simple as buying a new processor as the modern versions won't work with my motherboard. It seems I need to replace the Z87 board with a Z790 which will then fit the 12th/13th and possibly 14th Generation Intel Processors.

Can I ask where you'd steer me to go? I've seen 3 recommended Processors: i9-14900k (£415); i7-13700k (£263) and i5-12400k (£99). I believe the ASUS replacement for my board is the ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 (£542) but there is a more budget friendly MSI Z790 Tomahawk (£200) but this will not support 14th Generation Processors.

I don't need anything particularly powerful - I don't do gaming. Most use is Microsoft Office and emails, lots of spreadsheets, documents and Power Points, around 8000 songs on i Tunes which I have going in the background, I'm regularly looking at YouTube videos for long periods, stream football matches around once a week but I want to install Ableton music production software too. I want to get as future-proof as possible without going too extreme. Reliability, stability, speed and compatibility with latest software is my main driver.

I have no idea on how to get TPM 2.0 on my PC, if possible. And I'm wondering whether upgrading the Motherboard and Processor will be enough or whether there will be other things that also need changing as I upgrade those 2 components.

Many thanks for any advice.

 

[Tetras]

I have no idea on how to get TPM 2.0 on my PC, if possible. And I'm wondering whether upgrading the Motherboard and Processor will be enough or whether there will be other things that also need changing as I upgrade those 2 components.

TPM 2.0 should be something you can enable on any motherboard from 8th gen onwards without having any need for a separate TPM header/module, however the BIOS does need to be updated on some PCs, because the manufacturer didn't always enable these options (TPM 2.0 and secure boot) when the motherboard was first released. Any PC from 10th gen onwards (certainly 12th-14th) should have those options enabled by default.

Can I ask where you'd steer me to go? I've seen 3 recommended Processors: i9-14900k (£415); i7-13700k (£263) and i5-12400k (£99). I believe the ASUS replacement for my board is the ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 (£542) but there is a more budget friendly MSI Z790 Tomahawk (£200) but this will not support 14th Generation Processors.

I don't need anything particularly powerful - I don't do gaming. Most use is Microsoft Office and emails, lots of spreadsheets, documents and Power Points, around 8000 songs on i Tunes which I have going in the background, I'm regularly looking at YouTube videos for long periods, stream football matches around once a week but I want to install Ableton music production software too. I want to get as future-proof as possible without going too extreme. Reliability, stability, speed and compatibility with latest software is my main driver.

From the sound of your usage, it would be madness to buy the Maximus or an i7/i9 CPU, there's no need for that kind of hardware here. The Tomahawk would be more than sufficient, but that's also overkill.

Personally, if you're set on Intel I would either go 12th gen (i5-12400/12400F, i5-12600K/i7-12700K) or go for the Core Ultra 245K/265K. 13th-14th gen are potentially broken, so unless you trust the extended warranty (5 year on K-CPUs) I don't see the point in taking that risk.

I've done some reading online and understand it's not just as simple as buying a new processor as the modern versions won't work with my motherboard.

Officially: no, there's nothing you can do, unofficially: you can use a hack to bypass the hardware requirements and install it.

£300 option (CPU cooler in the CPU box):

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x Intel Core i5-12400 2.50GHz (Alder Lake) Socket LGA1700 Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-6AL-IN) = £139.99
• 1 x MSI B760 Gaming Plus WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR4 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MOT-MSI-03047) = £119.99
• 1 x Kingston Fury Beast 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit (SKU: MY-295-KS) = £52.99

Total: £316.97 (includes delivery: £3.99)​

£600 option:

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x Intel Core Ultra 5 245K (Arrow Lake) Socket LGA 1851 Processor - Retail (SKU: PRO-INT-03113) = £289.99
• 1 x Intel Holiday Bundle - Assassin's Creed Shadows + Ubisoft Plus (SKU: DIG-INT-03637) = £0.00
• 1 x Asrock Z890 Pro-A (LGA 1851) DDR5 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MOT-ASR-03365) = £179.99
• 1 x Corsair Vengeance EXPO/XMP 32GB (2X16GB) DDR5 PC5-48000C36 6000MHz Dual Channel Kit (SKU: MEM-CRS-00996) = £82.99
• 1 x Arctic Freezer 36 120m Black CPU Cooler - 2x 120mm (SKU: COO-ARC-02420) = £22.99

Total: £583.96 (includes delivery: £7.99)​

 

[Rob 63]

Thanks Tetras for taking the time to do that. I'll go through your recommendations and make a choice.

You've also put my mind at rest by confirming that I can get things upgraded at a reasonable price (£300 to £600) to keep going for another few years with the latest Operating System when a new PC from Dell or Lenovo to that spec would have cost me around £1500 from what I saw. The advice I was getting over the phone was that it was not fixable or would cost me more to fix than a new machine...

 

[Tetras]

The advice I was getting over the phone was that it was not fixable or would cost me more to fix than a new machine...

It is not fixable in the sense that: you can never make your CPU/motherboard compatible with Windows 11 officially (only unofficially) and there is no CPU upgrade on your current motherboard that would work.

You've also put my mind at rest by confirming that I can get things upgraded at a reasonable price (£300 to £600) to keep going for another few years with the latest Operating System when a new PC from Dell or Lenovo to that spec would have cost me around £1500 from what I saw.

Since you put your PC together yourself, you don't have any proprietary parts and PCs are still largely the same as they were, so your case, PSU and storage should still be good.

There are two potential complications I can think of:
- If your PSU has the required connectors (some old PSUs didn't have the EPS12v 8-pin, for example, at the top of the motherboard).
- If your SSD is formatted to MBR then you can't install Windows 11 on it because it only supports GPT for the boot drive.

You could buy a small M.2 SSD if necessary to run as a boot drive and hopefully your PSU is fine.

 

[Rob 63]

Really helpful, thanks.
The more I look into things, the more I realise how many variables there are and how I could easily miss something in my PC which dictates the suitability of new parts.
Is there such a thing on the site as recommended specialists who could look at my PC and make specific recommendations? Am in West London

 

[Tetras]

Really helpful, thanks.
The more I look into things, the more I realise how many variables there are and how I could easily miss something in my PC which dictates the suitability of new parts.
Is there such a thing on the site as recommended specialists who could look at my PC and make specific recommendations? Am in West London

If you can post the exact model name/number of:
Your PSU.
Your case.
Your SSD(s).

Then we can check that for you to make sure it'll fit/work.

 

[Rob 63]

Thanks again Tetras.

I found my original invoices from late 2013/early 2014 when my friend built the PC and still have some of the original boxes. I don't really know what I'm talking about here so apologies if any of this is irrelevant:

1. CASE: Antec 25 Solo II. It has front headphone, microphone and 4 USB ports of which 2 ports are USB3. There are also USB ports at the rear
2. MOTHERBOARD: Asus Z87-C (C2) Rev 1.xx [Stickers on the box say: (1) Intel CHIPSET Z287; (2) Supports Intel Core; (3) CPU support LGA 1150; (4) Windows 8 Ready]
3. CPU: Intel Core i5-4440 [email protected], 3101MHz, 4 Cores, 4 Logical Processors
4. OS: Microsoft Windows 10 PRO, 10.0.19045, Build 19045 (Upgraded from Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1 - [OEM] EN in early 2022)
5. INTERNAL HARD DRIVE: Seagate Barracuda SATA 6 Gb/s - 2.0 TB
6. SSD: Samsung SSD 870 EVO SATA 2.5" 500GB. (Replacement for Samsung SSD 840 EVO Basic SSD SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" - 500GB SSD in early 2022 as a precaution after rough transit from overseas)
7. RAM: Corsair XMS3 Vengeance LP DDR3 PC3-12800 (CL9...) 8GB Kit. I still have the box which has 2x 4 GB written on it.
8. PSU: Be Quiet! PURE POWER L8 CM 430W
9. COOLER: Corsair H60 High Performance Hydro CPU Cooler Hydro Series H60 v2
10. OPTICAL DISC DRIVE: Asus DRW-24F1ST SATA - Bulk (Black)
11. BLU-RAY DRIVE: Asus BC-12D2HT

Other information that appears on my current System Information Report that may be relevant:
SYSTEM TYPE: x64-based PC
BIOS VERSION/DATE: American Megatrends Inc. 1405, 19/08/2013
EMBEDDED CONTROLLER VERSION: 255.255
BIOS MODE: UEFI

I can't find any details of the Graphics Card but I do remember my friend telling me at the time of the build that it was a good standard (for the time, of course)

I hope this is enough for any recommendations. It's not urgent as (touch wood!) everything is working fine atm. I just want to future-proof myself as much as possible and be able to upgrade to Windows 11 or ideally 12 before next October. I had been looking at 14th Generation Intel Processors but as pointed out in other posts both 13th and 14th generation seem potentially risky, although I've also read that this only affects the i9 CPUs. I'd wanted to go as powerful as possible for future-proofing and speed/stability but maybe I should stick with i5 or i7 if more stable. Or wait until 15th Generation comes out (I understand fairly soon) which will hopefully have fixed the glitches.

I suspect that there is more than the Motherboard and CPU that needs to be upgraded from my current spec to bring my machine into the modern era, so I may well start on that gradually over the next 10 months.

Thanks for any thoughts/advice.

 

[Tetras]

Or wait until 15th Generation comes out (I understand fairly soon) which will hopefully have fixed the glitches.

My second spec in post #2 is 15th gen, they're already out, but Intel renamed them to Core Ultra.

I'd wanted to go as powerful as possible for future-proofing and speed/stability but maybe I should stick with i5 or i7 if more stable. Or wait until 15th Generation comes out (I understand fairly soon) which will hopefully have fixed the glitches.

On the Intel side, I don't really recommend buying an i7 or i9 of the 13th-14th gen generation because it makes the cooling more difficult due to the high power use. The i5 CPUs are generally easy to cool with air cooling and you'd be fine with the Core Ultra 245K or 265K since they lowered the power use somewhat from the previous gen. The 285K is still 200+, so that gets rather tricky (i.e. noisy) on air and I wouldn't want to fit a CPU like that in your existing case.

CASE: Antec 25 Solo II. It has front headphone, microphone and 4 USB ports of which 2 ports are USB3. There are also USB ports at the rear

This has wide compatibility, so that's great, but it is dated by modern standards and rather cramped inside. You might want to choose Micro-ATX instead.

How much space is there for the CPU cooler (I'm thinking of the height)? Anandtech have a review which says 180mm, so that would support a pretty large air cooler.

2x (front panel) USB2 and 2x (front panel) USB3 shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of boards you can buy now.

INTERNAL HARD DRIVE: Seagate Barracuda SATA 6 Gb/s - 2.0 TB
SSD: Samsung SSD 870 EVO SATA 2.5" 500GB. (Replacement for Samsung SSD 840 EVO Basic SSD SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" - 500GB SSD in early 2022 as a precaution after rough transit from overseas)

Even the really low-end boards usually have 2x SATA ports, so you should be good there.

PSU: Be Quiet! PURE POWER L8 CM 430W

It looks like it has at least 1x EPS12v, so you should be fine (even if a board has 2x, they can usually run with 1x).

Thanks for any thoughts/advice.

Based on what I can see there, I would suggest sticking with something like the 2 specs I posted in post #2, since I think they're reasonable for your current parts to handle.

For the 12th gen, a 12600K is the maximum I'd recommend (you'd need a cooler like the freezer 36 in the second spec), unless the 12700K is particularly good value.
For Core Ultra (15th gen equivalent), a 265K.

INTERNAL HARD DRIVE: Seagate Barracuda SATA 6 Gb/s - 2.0 TB
SSD: Samsung SSD 870 EVO SATA 2.5" 500GB. (Replacement for Samsung SSD 840 EVO Basic SSD SATA 6 Gb/s 2.5" - 500GB SSD in early 2022 as a precaution after rough transit from overseas)

For ease of use/installation, I'd suggest you buy a small M.2 drive (500GB or 1TB, depending on value per GB) to slot in the new motherboard and use for the new Windows installation and then you can just keep these drives "as is" and import them into the new Windows install as storage. If you take this route, I'd recommend that you don't plug them into the motherboard until the installation has completed on the M.2 SSD.