Changing Motherboard

[Garett1]

Hello! In the near future I am going to be replacing my Motherboard with a newer one as mine is quite outdated. I realize there is a lot of confusion with the Windows 10 Upgrade product key and such.

I have my Windows 10 product key linked to my Microsoft account. Is there any other steps I should take before replacing? Is there going to have to be a fresh install? Should I have Windows 10 ISO on a USB or Disc?

[paprikman]

It's not food, so it cannot be outdated.

Just don't bother with some useless stuff, keep it till it works.

Also, your windows key is bound both to the mobo and account, so you won't be able to use the existing key.

[Garett1]

7 minutes ago, paprikman said:

It's not food, so it cannot be outdated.

Just don't bother with some useless stuff, keep it till it works.

Also, your windows key is bound both to the mobo and account, so you won't be able to use the existing key.

The pcie clip is broken on my mobo so I cannot upgrade graphics card. So I am replacing because of that and it only has a 800mhz cap on Ram

[typographie]

13 minutes ago, Garett1 said:

The pcie clip is broken on my mobo so I cannot upgrade graphics card. So I am replacing because of that and it only has a 800mhz cap on Ram

DDR3 actually running at 800 MHz is heavily underclocked, and it seems unlikely that your motherboard would accept DDR3 DIMMs but then limit them to such a low frequency. Note that some monitoring utilities will report memory frequencies of half what you expect them to be, because they don't take the double data rate multiplier into account. DDR3-1600 will show up as 800 MHz in CPU-Z, for example.

 

Swapping the motherboard generally seems to break Windows activations, regardless of whether you did a clean install or just left the existing installation in place. You'll probably need a new Windows license if you change your motherboard.