Will it work? Mobo and CPU without OS Reinstall?

[mckeown]

I just purchased a MSI Z270 with a i7-7700k and DDR4 Ram. I am planning on keeping my hard drives (SSD for games and OS, HD for docs etc.), graphics card Nvidia 1080 FE, PSU, case etc. My Question is when I exchange the old mother board and processor, do I need to reinstall windows 10? Or can i just, 'plug an play'?

The previous CPU and Mobo are i5-2550K and Gigabite H67A-UD3h-B3.

If i need to reinstall, why? (so I can learn)

 

[kanewolf]

You will have a much better system if you do a clean install. Besides getting rid of the leftover (and incorrect) hardware assumptions that Windows has configured, you get a fresh clean (and much smaller) registry. Bite the bullet and do it the right way with an O/S install.

 

[Scottray]

It may work without a clean windows install. HOWEVER, it's also very possible that you'll have unexplainable glitched, low fps rates on your GPU and other strange issues due to wrong/un-optimized drivers. Unless you really enjoy chasing these type of issues, just do a clean install.