Question about switching hardware between Cpu's..kinda newb question.

Hello all!

What I want to do, and am hoping if anyone could point out any compatibility issues or anything I may have not thought about... is for my sons 11th Bday, I am building him a gaming rig. an upgrade from his current-broken old HP Core Duo Pentium 4. (he only plays minecraft and sometimes league of legends)

I am planning on salvaging his old CPU's power supply (good 550Wcorsair) and G.skill ram, Hard drive and CD/dvd drives. And placing it into a better Case with the MB and ram from my personal current build.

(MY current Build)
-I have my own Mountain mod build which I will be giving my son my MB and CPU from it: intel I-5-k sandy, ASUS P8z68 deluxe gen3 MB. ect.

-This way I can purchase a new Asus Z97 maximus VII Hero MB, and a Haswell I-5-K CPU , which will go into and upgrade my Mountain Mod build...see what I'm doing here lol


So between using his hard drives with windows 7, on my old P8z68 MB... he should be good to go right? I want to use his current hard drive so I don't have to reinstall windows, or format over his old games/files...the hard drive should still plug and play and load up into windows normally after switching out Mother boards right ?

I am also getting him a Saphire Radeon R9 Graphics card as well. That way its not like I'm totally giving him all my old stuff. lol

Thanks Chris.

Ah, it might boot but it will be a mess. Even if you get through the ton of errors and load the proper drivers, it will run terrible.

If its a standard HD, I would say try and find a cheap 60-120GB drive for Windows and load a fresh OS on it. If he only plays minecraft and LoL I would just wipe it and start fresh though.

ditto my best advise is to always re-install to avoid issues. Specially when chaning chipsets.

O man. Then this means I'll have to do a fresh OS reinstall on my PC as well since I'll also be putting in a new cpu and MB. I hate having to do this .

Here's a question...should I not use windows backup on to another drive....reformat and reinstall win7, and then restore the backed up files?? OR Is this just backing up crap which will cause issues anyways.

Installing backed-up files from a previous OS install on a fresh OS install is just asking for trouble. You'll just poop on a fresh install and it will be all for nothing. Avoid the trouble and just do a clean OS install.

Your best bet is to save your important files, pictures, etc on a flash drive. Once you've installed your fresh OS, then just copy over your saved files from the flash drive.

Yea I was thinking the same analogy. Guess if I'm gonna do this... might as well do it right. I just hate the initial quirks of having to update this and that for all my drivers, tweak this to get rid of that error measage...Ect ect. Thats usually needed after a fresh OS install

Thanks for the confirmation of what I need todo.

Roger that! Well if it's any consolation I had to do the same exact thing when I switched board & cpu. I had a Z77 board and a 3570K. Swapping over to the current setup (sig) I did a fresh clean os install. I really didn't want to and usually I get away with it, but SIN recommended I do a fresh install just to be on the safe side.

I hate that bum, but he's lucky he's my friend

no sir ur the lucky one as if'n we werent friends I'd of let ya go with ur plans and laugh uncontrollably as you bytched and moaned about your issues you were having.

Get a program called "steam mover", move the games and such to a backup drive. This DOESNT have to be a "steam" game for this to work.


Then format, and reinstall windows. Then use steam mover again to reinstall the games. Would take much less time than redownloading everything (unless you have google fiber or some crazy isp haha). It doesn't just "move" the files, it actually will change the registry as well, so it will be a "proper" installation.

Okay, I got a little confused with what was being swapped with what but it sounded like you were going to use DDR2 RAM in a motherboard that needs DDR3.

Well I know the ram on my P8Z68. Is ddr3. If my son's ram isnt...I'll just give him mine along with the mitherboard. You, see....this is just an excuse and my rational to upgrade to Haswell, under the guise of getting my son's birthday present covered. I'll check out that steam mover... I have a lot of games I wanna transfer myself.

A core duo Pentium 4 will use DDR2 RAM.