What do you do after changing motherboards?

[LuLWaT]

So after changing your motherboard, what do you do? Will your system just boot to the bios and require a fresh windows install? If not, do you just have to download your new motherboard drivers? Thanks!

[xQubeZx]

If im right you can just get new drivers but its reccomended to do a fresh install so the old drivers and such wont cause troubles. Well I would reccomend a fresh install. Better to do that now than realise you have  a shit ton of problems later with drivers.

[LuLWaT]

If im right you can just get new drivers but its reccomended to do a fresh install so the old drivers and such wont cause troubles. Well I would reccomend a fresh install. Better to do that now than realise you have  a shit ton of problems later with drivers.

That does make sense. Would you install the new motherboard, then boot off of a USB to install windows, or just boot the PC and do the fresh install through windows itself?

[Kyzer]

That does make sense. Would you install the new motherboard, then boot off of a USB to install windows, or just boot the PC and do the fresh install through windows itself?

Generally changing any hardware doesn't require fresh install. It just improves performance since you can refilter out what you actually need and don't need on your hard drive.

[Glenwing]

Your OS is stored on your hard drive, so you will not have to reinstall your OS. Even changing from an AMD platform to Intel does not require a reinstall of the OS. However, motherboards have various drivers installed in the OS so all their functions will work (USB ports, ethernet, etc.) and changing motherboards tends to leave behind a lot of leftover "gunk" in the OS which makes it more sluggish, so for best results a fresh OS install can be done, but it's not required.

 

If you don't have an optical drive, make sure you download your new motherboard's drivers from the manufacturer's website and put them on a flash drive or something before you actually change the board. Once you put in the new board, in most cases your ethernet port will not work until you install the driver for it, which makes it difficult to actually download the driver in the first place.

[Kyzer]

Your OS is stored on your hard drive, so you will not have to reinstall your OS. Even changing from an AMD platform to Intel does not require a reinstall of the OS. However, motherboards have various drivers installed in the OS so all their functions will work (USB ports, ethernet, etc.) and changing motherboards tends to leave behind a lot of leftover "gunk" in the OS which makes it more sluggish, so for best results a fresh OS install can be done, but it's not required.

basically what I said but not tl;dr

 

I would recommend Windows Server 2016, speed of W10 without all the extra junk. More work, but it's worth it for almost no CPU usage from the OS.

[LuLWaT]

Thanks a lot guys!

[xgn]

There is no drivers for the mobo. The bios on the mobo is stored on the mobo itself. Maybe there is drivers for some extra functions but nothing will break without fresh install.

[xQubeZx]

There is no drivers for the mobo. The bios on the mobo is stored on the mobo itself. Maybe there is drivers for some extra functions but nothing will break without fresh install.

There is ethernet drivers for example..Kinda hard without them.