Greetings, Im sorry to ask this here but, actually this is the only place I can find people with this level of knowledge lol.

Thisi s the thing, I want to get a socket 1155 MOBO, with the 2700k processor, right now i have a 1366 socket MOBO with the i7 960.

A guy told me I will have to reinstall windows because the drivers will mess up the whole system.

I dont know what is the problem I understand the drivers may cause weird stuffs but it can be fixed by reinstalling drivers.


My HDD are sata at 6gb/s, I read somewhere that if your HDD is fully compatible with the MOBO, it doesnt mean you have to reinstall windows and software after a chipset upgrade.


Guys please tell me what to do, If I need to do a backup disc or what? lol

I don't think changing a CPU needs a new Windows installation lol.

Only thing you can do is try it, I had a copy of windows from a P2 detect what drivers it needed and work properly on an AMD64 board once, another time a P3 installation refused to work on a P4 :/ If your running XP then I'd suggest re-installing anyway as it can get cruddy after a while, if your running 7 then its likely it will just work with the new board and it doesn't seem to get slow and bloated over time. If your running vi**a then I suggest installing something else, DOS, an Amiga emulator, anything.

It's not required but highly recommended.

If in Windows 7, just note the old drivers and delete/uninstall them after the new ones are installed.

Windows XP or Vista -> reinstall (If you back up right + know how to edit registry reinstalling an OS and all previous software only takes 15-30 minutes)

Quote from Bose321 :

I don't think changing a CPU needs a new Windows installation lol.

is a cpu change but with a new board (different sockets 1366 to 1155)

Quote :

If in Windows 7, just note the old drivers and delete/uninstall them after the new ones are installed.

this looks logic to me, a guy told me something about the processor´s cache could mess some stuff, not sure if that is legit lol

I've done motherboard swaps numerous times without reinstalling. Just make sure you have the NIC driver for the new motherboard handy, maybe the chipset drivers too. You can just download all the other drivers.

There's not really any need to uninstall the old drivers. Windows will just ignore them if the hardware isn't there.

The one thing that can make a motherboard swap challenging is if you have a RAID that uses the motherboard's chipset. I think even using the same chipset model (e.g. ICH10R) on a different board can break the RAID.

The only thing that might (and probably will) happen is that Windows will keep some files and config created for the old board. You could probably just uninstall any software that came with the old board, do the swap and hope for the best. If you notice any problems like random crashes, funky USB or slow performance, you can always do a clean install.
And just a side note, I don't think that Windows has gotten any better at handling this kind of things over time so the procedure should be the same for anything from W2K to W8...

Quote from MadCatX :

The only thing that might (and probably will) happen is that Windows will keep some files and config created for the old board. You could probably just uninstall any software that came with the old board, do the swap and hope for the best. If you notice any problems like random crashes, funky USB or slow performance, you can always do a clean install.
And just a side note, I don't think that Windows has gotten any better at handling this kind of things over time so the procedure should be the same for anything from W2K to W8...

well, I give up, I better do a clean install

thank you guys, I appreciatte your help very much!!