Hi,
I'm thinking of upgrading my current motherboard, an Asus H81M - Plus, to either an MSI Z97 Gaming 7 or an Asus Z97 Maximus VII Ranger. My question is; Do I need to install a brand new copy of Windows 8.1 or do a repair install of my current copy, everything else, CPU, graphics card, memory, SSD's etc, remains unchanged?
I know it may be a daft question, but I seriously do not know.
most will be untouched, you could offcourse uninstall all the drivers related to your mobo.
About Windows it could be that you get issues with your activation, i dont know if you have oem or retail? wenn you got retail you will be fine, if you got oem, you could get an issue with the activation, however you can allways call MS if you have a problem with that.
About both mobo´s the msi has more connectivity to offer, 8 sata ports, and 8 usb 3.0 ports. For the rest they are pretty similar. i could take you deeper into the Vreg design of both boards, because there is a little diffrence, but its not realy something to bother about. Further the Msi has killer lan, on which the Ranger has intel lan. i personaly prefer intel lan, but thats personal. Onboard audio, is nice on both boards.