Question Is it still necessary to do a clean format after a motherboard + cpu change?

b3lcebu

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Dec 15, 2018
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Is it still necessary to do a clean format after a motherboard + cpu change these days with Windows 10 64 bits? Im changing my old system 3770k with z77 motherboard to a 9700k with z390 motherboard. Will i have a lot of issues and garbage on my OS if i dont do a clean install? Ohh also im changing my boot drive to a M2 NVME from an ssd
 

ElFenix

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Mar 20, 2000
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hasn't been necessary since before the win2k days. swapped boards all the time on win2k, amd->intel and vice versa with winxp, and most recently went intel -> amd on win 10 (and that was with an upgraded license). every once in a while i've done performance tests and swapping hasn't affected it.
 
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Red Squirrel

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May 24, 2003
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It's always better but if I'm lazy I'll image it and see if it boots. It's kind of a 50/50 chance as it might just blue screen and you have to clean install anyway. Heck even with Linux I find it's hit and miss, I'll often get dumped into a grub shell that I can't do anything with. But I find even if it does boot it will be a "messy" install since it's going to have lot of crap left over that's not in use but still potentially causing issues. My workplace does this for every PC upgrade they just image to the new PC and our PCs are full of weird issues.

A clean install gets you back to a fresh state with all proper drivers and stuff.