680i to 780i

[woundingchaney]

I am moving from an asus 680i board (p5n32-e) to a evga 780i given the similarity of the two chipsets I was hoping I could do so without the need to reinstall windows. Searching the net has resulted in various user experiences (that I dont inherently trust). I was hoping perhaps someone has had experience with the issue and could offer either advice or confirm that this is possible.


Thank You for your time.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I recently moved a windows install from a nforce 2 mobo to a nforce 3 one, didn't need a reinstall (from socket A to the Asrock AM2 AGP mobo).
It didn't work from VIA KT333 chipset to nforce 3 and 5 : blue screen at boot!

that seemed to confirm feelings about upgrades being mostly fine if within the same chipset vendor, and mostly bad else.

 

[Florin]

The following may not even be necessary for the relatively simple move that you're doing, but I've found that as long as you change your IDE/ATAPI controller to 'Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller' before you move the drive to a new system, you can get away with almost anything.

I just transplanted an AMD Nforce 4 system with tripleboot XP, XP64 and Vista64 to an Intel board with P35 chipset.

First I switched the IDE controllers to standard in the device manager, uninstalled all Nvidia software, verified all OSes booted fine on new board, installed Intel INF updates, rebooted again, manually changed IDE controllers to Intel ICH9 AHCI, restarted, switched controllers from IDE to AHCI in BIOS, and hey presto. All OSes work great with native drive support and without exclamation marks in device manager. No repair installs either. Easy.

 

[Blazkowicz]

sure things are nicer when you're not moving from dead mobos

 

[woundingchaney]

System up and running with no reinstall needed. System booted and loaded drivers. Everything is working fine. Now for the third 8800gtx

 

[ChrisRay]

Theres no reason to reinstall windows if your using Vista. I have made alot of changes to an installation recently. Switching from an Asus A8N32 SLI Deluxe ((Nforce 5)) to an EVGA 680I. To an XFX 790I and I have not had to reinstall Vista once.

Chris

 

[suryad]

If you have not purchased the 780i mobo yet why dont you go for the 790i chipset? Anandtech gave it a glowing review. I dont see much difference between the 780i and 790i other than official 1600 mhz support which I dont care for because I am still running at 1600 and DDR3 support.

 

[woundingchaney]

If you have not purchased the 780i mobo yet why dont you go for the 790i chipset? Anandtech gave it a glowing review. I dont see much difference between the 780i and 790i other than official 1600 mhz support which I dont care for because I am still running at 1600 and DDR3 support.

Well the mobo came from someone who had an extra. I picked it up considerably below retail value, otherwise I would have simply stayed with the 680i.

 

[Thorburn]

780i isn't worth the money.

It should work though as they use the same southbridge, it'll spend a good while picking up new devices on the first boot though.

Windows will almost certainly need reactivating too.