Want to upgrade my 2year old system - works fine but I can then use the bits to upgrade a 5year old system. Ive got a intel 8400 chip on an asus P5Q pro MB. 6gb ram, running 64bit vista. My Plan, replace motherboard,(suggestions? there seem so many) 2500k intel chip, and 4 0r 8gb ram. Did build the 1st one myself, but have been looking at bundles now. few questions, as well as MB one above, is it safe to presume power supply will be ok, it was a good one 2 years ago can i just dismantle, rebuild and hard disc will just with new set up. I am using a radeon 4850 graphics card, would i swop it over or use the on board graphics. thanks
Hi, As long as the powersupply can handle the wattage and provide the voltage for your new hardware, I dont see why it wouldnt work. A good quality powersupply can last for years. As for just taking the hard drive you currently have out of the computer and then into the new one, a lot of people will tell you that no, its not possible and that you have to wipe it out and start with a fresh image. That is a valid opinion and its the easiest option to do and there is nothing wrong with doing it. However, if you really do not want to have to reinstall everything on your drive, you can move it to the new hardware without reimaging. HOWEVER, just be prepared for a lot of errors coming up when you do this. There will be lots of driver errors coming up, so what you should do before you move the drive is to uninstall all the old drivers for your system board and any hardware that is not moving into the new system. This way, you will get less errors coming up and will have a somewhat easier time of setting the drive up in the new system. Its not pretty and can be a pain, but I did this with my last cpu/motherboard upgrade and it actually went pretty smoothly. If you are not planning on buying a new video card when you upgrade, I would keep the radeon graphics card you have for the new computer. Onboard graphics/integrated graphics usually use your system's ram, which takes ram away from other processes or applications that could use it. A discrete graphics card, like your radeon 4850 has its own ram so it doesnt take away system RAM that other applications use.
