Well ladies and gents as the title would suggest I'm upgrading my PC!.
SKIP TO THE BOTTOM FOR THE ACTUAL QUESTIONS
I originally bought a pre-built system from Newegg that I caught on a deal.
Case: Crappy Case with a single exhaust fan
Processor: FX 6300
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2
Graphics Card: MSI R7 250X
PSU: Some unbranded 450W
Single 1TB HDD
1 X 8GB RAM
I have since added a Side 120mm fan to keep SOME air moving but I wasn't planning on holding onto this thing for long.
I have a new Phanteks Enthoo Pro I'm switching everything into.
New Mobo is: ASUS M5A99FX Pro R2.0
PSU is EVGA 750W 80+Gold Fully Modular
So here's the question(s)
When I take everything out of this old case and start slapping all the toys onto the new mobo is it all just plug and play?
More specifically, When I reconnect the HDD where my Windows is, Does it all just work fine? Or are there some steps I need to take before I start moving things over. I don't want to get done swapping all the parts to find I skipped step 1.....
Otherwise the actual physical installation of hardware is easy and I have a PC building friend who has done this many times to assist. Just didn't know what happens when I changed the MOBO without a fresh copy of Windows.
THANKS GUYS!
RAZE THE WORLD
Just do complete reinstallation of windows and you probably wont have to suffer of strange things happening. Download legit windows iso somewhere and use legit key.
You shouldn't have a problem, but BACK IT UP. The only reason it might not work on a new mobo is that your drive isn't selected as a boot disk. That being said, if the drive itself is recognized by the system, but isn't at the top of the list, it'll scan through all your connected drives looking for a bootable one first before getting to your actual windows drive, so startup might take 3000 milliseconds longer than usual. I also once put my windows drive straight into a mac (after BACKING UP) and it worked perfectly!
Also, I've been seeing 64 gig ssds on sale in the last few days for next to nothing, and nothing will give you a snappier system than that. Food for thought. Thanks for upgrading the PSU! you will be able to use that for crossfire/sli in the future and it wont catch on fire!
Best of luck!
Haha that PSU upgrade was done exactly for that reason!
Another quick question here, can I use a laptop as a backup storage device? I don't have a spare HDD and I can't exactly aquire an SSD at the moment as much as I would like to.
oof. It might be easiest to take the hdd out of the laptop and put it in your desktop, maybe create a new partition inside the laptop hdd just big enough for a clone or restore point. Only if you have the cables though, and you'd have to take apart both computers every time you want to back up.
You might also try to create a clone/restore point on your desktop drive then move it over to the laptop over your router.
Both options would take some time though.....
OKAY! Got a 240GB ssd instead! Sales at local stores are lovely. What's the process here? I haven't done a thing and want to do the entire transfer to the new case, mobo, and all tomorrow.
Ps. yall are the best...
Nice! I'd start off by looking at a couple build videos on the youtube. THen I'd probably get your OS transfered to the SSD first before you start moving physical components. Can be done with cloning or with a system backup and your windows install disk. Do you have an extra SATA cable and Sata power connector on PSU? Its always nice to have SSD as system disk and HHD as mass storage.
For moving components over, get your layout planned first. I'd go roughly in this order:
1. Fans/filters/IO sheild/Mobo standoffs-get the cabling roughly sorted
2. PSU-get the cabling roughly sorted. Also make sure you can keep yourself grounded. Keep mobo on a safe surface
3. MOBO- don't remove your cooler
4. Everything else
Keep it neat and tidy, dont do while intoxicated, and have fun!
Well I did everything last night at about 3am. And it posted and I'm running windows off my HDD still.
Haven't yet installed the SSD due to I needed to sleep XD
Everything works fine and it's so much quieter!!
I just need to throw the SSD in now. I can't imagine there's an easy way to pull just the OS off my HDD and leave the games and all that there?