Upgrading my pc, need help

mjhtrf5ersddrfty · November 3, 2019

So, im planning on upgrading my PC. Ill get everything out of the way right now. I currently have a intel i5-7400, a msi b250 matx pro vdh motherboard, 16 gigs of ddr4 2400mhz ram, a gtx 1660 with a beefy OC on it, an asus PCE-AC56 PCIe network adapter, a 400w non modular 80+ psu, a deepcool tesseract matx/atx case, a 1tb hdd and 32gb of intel optane. I want to upgrade to a ryzen 5 3600, a Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS ATX AM4 Motherboard, a Samsung 860 Evo 1 TB 2.5" Sata SSD, a NZXT H510 ATX Case, and a corsair rmx 850w psu. All these parts are compatible FYI. I have never done an upgrade as big as this, and i dont know how to do it. A couple things i want to note: I want to keep all of my files and photos/documents. I also am keeping the HDD, im just getting the SSD as well to be my primary drive. Ive seen software that can move your OS and files directly to the SSD as if they were untouched, keeping everything in the same place as it was before, just now on your SSD, as long as the SSD and the HDD are the same storage size. That would be ideal for me, as then I could just swap everything to my SSD and seamlessly get back to doing what I do on the SSD, but im not sure if that would work as im switching motherboards and CPU's. I also plan to continue using my intel optane drive, with StoreMI, so I can have my SSD as my primary drive, with all my current files and applications on it, and also have a HDD, for files I dont need frequent access to, but still have the HDD be accelerated with optane. I am also planning on using my old RAM and GPU, and ill just use the box cooler that comes stock with the 3600 for now, as even using a stock cooler the ryzen 5 3600 is still miles ahead of a i5 7400, having 2 extra cores, a 1.2ghz extra base speed and having SMT opposed to no SMT, with 12 threads compared to 4. At first I was planning on upgrading to a i5 9600k, as it would make my life a lot easier, but the extra 6 threads with the 3600 is an absolute deal breaker for me. I am wondering on what i need to know before switching platforms, how to move my data and files to a fresh OS, or if I can just plug my existing HDD in without any modification, which i doubt is possible, and anything else I should know before upgrading. Thanks in advance, and im sorry if this was a lot to take in at once.

Corrupt_Liberty · November 3, 2019

HOLY GIANT WALL OF TEXT BATMAN!

Windows 10 is actually fairly good at sorting out a change in hardware, including your motherboard. That being said it's not great at cleaning itself up afterward. You might consider reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch. Just back up your important files first. If you do want to just move everything to the SSD then I have Acronis in the past with great success. It even does a good job with changing drive sizes.

I don't think you'll gain much from Optane on mass storage but it's your headache.

I would also recommend getting an NVME SSD instead of SATA. It's just so much faster. The ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB drive is just as fast as the Samsung 970 Evo for basically the same price as your sata drive.

mjhtrf5ersddrfty · November 3, 2019

1 minute ago, Corrupt_Liberty said:

HOLY GIANT WALL OF TEXT BATMAN!

Windows 10 is actually fairly good at sorting out a change in hardware, including your motherboard. That being said it's not great at cleaning itself up afterward. You might consider reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch. Just back up your important files first. If you do want to just move everything to the SSD then I have Acronis in the past with great success. It even does a good job with changing drive sizes.

I don't think you'll gain much from Optane on mass storage but it's your headache.

I would also recommend getting an NVME SSD instead of SATA. It's just so much faster. The ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB drive is just as fast as the Samsung 970 Evo for basically the same price as your sata drive.

Thanks for the advice, ill consider the other ssd. one thing though, I assume intel has many drivers installed for their chipset/cpu, and switching to amd, would that cause any issues? Am i just better off going through the headache of a clean install? also, ive watched videos on store MI, and it seems to work pretty good, and considering i already have optane laying around i figure why not get a bit of extra speed. Extremely useful? probably not. But considering it seems to be very easy, as you just select your drives and it does all the work for you in a short amount of time, and since its pretty effortless for extra performance, i figured i might as well. but yeah, so my motherboard will have 2 m.2 slots, so ill have room for the Adata ssd you recommended, and the optane, so ill be pretty much set. from there on im hoping this PC will last me upwards of 3-4 years, with perhaps a ram upgrade in a couple months(not that i dont have enough ram, its just that 2400mhz ram is slow nowadays) as well as a gpu upgrade down the road. Thanks for the help, and if there is anything else I should know please let me know

Corrupt_Liberty · November 3, 2019

10 minutes ago, YouTube UniteReaper said:

Thanks for the advice, ill consider the other ssd. one thing though, I assume intel has many drivers installed for their chipset/cpu, and switching to amd, would that cause any issues? Am i just better off going through the headache of a clean install? also, ive watched videos on store MI, and it seems to work pretty good, and considering i already have optane laying around i figure why not get a bit of extra speed. Extremely useful? probably not. But considering it seems to be very easy, as you just select your drives and it does all the work for you in a short amount of time, and since its pretty effortless for extra performance, i figured i might as well. but yeah, so my motherboard will have 2 m.2 slots, so ill have room for the Adata ssd you recommended, and the optane, so ill be pretty much set. from there on im hoping this PC will last me upwards of 3-4 years, with perhaps a ram upgrade in a couple months(not that i dont have enough ram, its just that 2400mhz ram is slow nowadays) as well as a gpu upgrade down the road. Thanks for the help, and if there is anything else I should know please let me know

You shouldn't^TM have any issues. But it is Windows we're talking about here. I'd backup any files that are important separate from a full drive backup. That way if the transition isn't as smooth as you'd like you can always fall back on a fresh install without losing anything important. Getting files off a drive image can be a royal pain.

Edit: I have two of those Adata drives in RAID 0 and when doing a sequential read test I can damn near saturate the 8x PCIE 3.0 lanes. It's so stupid fast.