Question about swapping motherboards

[goog40]

I have an Epox 8kha+ and the problems it has with my Radeon 8500 are driving me insane. Occasionally there's flickering horixontal lines on my screen, this also occurs whenever I go into the advanced display settings. It also randomly freezes up in games.

After reading through some threads in rage3d and updating my mobo and video card bioses and using the new drivers and playing around with some settings and none of them really helping, I figure I can either swap my motherboard, get a new video card, or try RMAing it to Ati with no guarantee of the replacement working(I read about several people who had these problems resolved by getting a RMA). But I figured it's not worth going through the hassle of a RMA since the replacement still might not work, and I do have an Abit KR7A sitting around so I thought I might try switching the motherboard.

So my question is, since the 8kha+ and KR7A both use the KT266a chipset, could there be any harm in just switching the motherboards without re-installing the OS?

 

[Jayczar]

Should not be too bad if at all, using the same chipset
is about the smoothest transition as far as mobo swaps
go IMHO. It is when you go from a VIA to an Intel or SIS
that can get hairy. Good luck!

 

[o1die]

I would download directx 8.1 before loading your driver. Remove the ati driver, then install directx8.1, reboot, and install the ati driver. I also use the "quality" settings instead of performance when I have problems.

 

[Nomans]

Goog40, chances are that you'll need to re-installing the OS (and of course all software). The reason for that is the OS will see only hardware, not just the chipset. There are a lot of hardware settings need to be aware of, incl. IRQs and all that crap. That's why I believe, as soon as you swap the 8kha+ and the KR7A, a plug-and-play OS like Windows starts trying to swap drivers for all the hardware components that it thinks need to be swapped. Windows is never good at swapping too many hardware at the same time, so it ends up corrupting itself very soon. Just my 2 cents...