RafflesTheThief

Oh no sorry, that I know. I just wanted to avoid having to buy another USB again! I'm a tightwad in eveything but PCs it would seem...
 
Ok, much appreciated. I'll do that rather than keep trying to mess around.

Way ahead of you there Did that as soon as I got the case and realised the 200mm was about as effective as an asthmatic ant carrying some heavy shopping (shamelessly stealing quotes there). 

don't forget to ground yourself 

just put in the power supply, and plug it in with the rocker switch turned off, and..
THATS IT, YOU'RE GROUNDED!
 
in all honesty, at work i replace parts in servers sitting on carpet in a bone dry room, and i've yet to have issues

Easiest way is to backup data to an external drive or a media drive and just swap in the new one and do a fresh install. No need to do the windows reset thing. Once you get into Windows go to settings and live update, run and install any updates and reboot. Run it again and reboot again if needed. I always install GeForce or Crimson and the newest drivers through that along with Corsair Link, etc if you have any water-cooling fan/pump software and then do a second reboot. One thing to note and the only reason I'm commenting is to put the USB stick into a 2.0 port, the Windows install is known to hang sometimes trying to install through 3.0 and you just have to reboot and try again, it doesn't harm anything but it's a big waste of time.

You just need to install the new motherboard drivers. You might need to call Microsoft to reactivate your Windows but that's about it.
That being said, a fresh install of Windows is always a cleaner way of doing things.
Moved to CPUs and Motherboards.