I have a budget gaming system that I bought from Tigerdirect. After 8 months of simming, I've got the urge to upgrade the motherboard and processor to something that can be overclocked (I was thinking of a Z77 board suitable for a 3570K). I'll also want to upgrade the powersupply as it's a entry-level 500W unit.

 

Some advice would be appreciated. It's a W8 machine, so is there a preferred manufacturer with solid drivers for W8? When swapping MoBos, are there applications that register against the hardware that are likely to crap out one me? Anything else to watch out for? I've never assembled a system from scratch or tried an upgrade beyond adding additional disk drives, so I'm a newbie at this stuff. Reply accordingly please. :-)

Just recently did the i5-3570K and ASRock Extreme4 upgrade myself.

 

For sure W8 will complain when you attempt to boot it after the upgrade.  You'll probably need to reinstall W8 due to the new hardware configuration and reactivate it.

 

I had to reinstall and re-activate everything because a new CPU and motherboard is essentially a new machine.

 

Not sure what the ramifications are if your version of W8 is OEM.  I have Win7 ugraded and had to call in to activate it.

 

Ernie

Yikes - yes, it's an OEM version. This certainly qualifies as a mantrap. Thanks for the heads-up Erine!

Same here, had to get a new copy of Windows after switching the motherboard and cpu. If you have to go to the trouble of reinstalling Windows then consider putting it on a SSD to reduce boot times.