Motherboard and CPU upgrade (From Intel to Ryzen)

[N0ddie]

Our son would like a PC in order to play games. The availability of really cheap/free/good children's games on PC is far superior than current games consoles. I am going to use this opportunity to upgrade my current PC and put some of my current components into his PC.

I'm going to buy myself the ASUS Crosshair 6 motherboard and Ryzen 1700 CPU and give him my current combo of ASUS Maximus 8 motherboard and 6700k CPU. I want to keep my current hard drives as they are with my stuff on them and will obviously buy him a small 250GB SSD to keep him going in the meantime.

Building and setting up his PC will be straightforward and just like starting a fresh however I'm unsure about my computer with the motherboard and CPU swap.

The questions I have are:

Is there a way to do this where I wont lose whats on my current set of hard drives? I have 1 SSD for my games library, 1 for my media, 1 for my backup and an M.2 for the OS. My research so far says that games, media and backup drives will be ok left as they are but I'll have to fresh install windows on the M.2 because of drivers conflicts with old vs. new system?

 

[Avet]

Data on drives will stay there until you format them or erase them. No matter in witch system they are.

If you are using windows 10 it should sort out drivers when you put your OS drive into the new system, and everything will be working fine. If you are switching from nvidia to radeon card use display driver uninstaller to clear drivers.

Or you can do a fresh OS install on your m.2 system drive. Make sure you copy my documents, desktop contents that you need. Latter you just go into steam and select your library folder and it is done.

 

[BigDaddyKong]

You definitely want a fresh OS install. It would work plugging it in as is, but there is a large performance penalty.

One of the best things you can ever do for yourself is set up a NAS.

 

[N0ddie]

Cheers guys. So just to confirm. If I do a fresh OS install on my M.2 then my other 3 drives wont be affected? Ie. there'll be no need to format these with a new OS install?

 

[Avet]

Cheers guys. So just to confirm. If I do a fresh OS install on my M.2 then my other 3 drives wont be affected? Ie. there'll be no need to format these with a new OS install?

No need to format them. Only format m.2.

 

[AlienALX]

If you are concerned about data loss then just fit the M2 drive and then connect up the other drives when Windows has installed.

 

[N0ddie]

Cheers folks. I'll let yous know how I get on.