Upgrading Build#2

[XenaWP]

Hey Guys--
Long time no see. Hope everything is going well for everyone.

I think it's time to freshen up Build #2 below. The USB has died (and let me say, I'm not very happy with Asus for not covering the repair gratis ... the board is only 3 months out of warranty and I started complaining about the USB 1.5 years ago ... but I digress).

Anyway, I'm looking at the following upgrade pieces:

Mobo:
Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-970A-UD3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Processor:
Newegg.com - AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ955FBGMBOX

RAM:
Newegg.com - CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9

I don't plan any overclocking or heavy-duty gaming, but I do like quality components and would like some decent performance since I do a fair amount of photo and some video editing.

Thanks for any thoughts you may have!

Xena
Still a Warrior ... never a Princess.

[Khalil]

It all looks good, you have chosen excellent CPU and RAM but I prefer Asus motherboards

[XenaWP]

Thanks Khalil. I know you have had good experience with Asus, and have probably used a great number of them. I don't think, with the bad luck I had with my one, that I'd feel comfortable getting another one.

Have you had or heard of any bad experience with Gigabyte? The board seems to have good specs, and they do have a 3-yr warranty like Asus.

[echrisinger]

Gigabyte boards are good, but their return staff - everything relating to returns/warranties is much worse than ASUS.

[jdeb]

I love me some Biostar boards for what it is worth. I have over 100 builds (budget boxes) with them and not one, yes, I said not one problem with any of them. I went with that brand over Foxconn a few years ago because my main supplier dropped them and was offering better pricing.

[Masaki 7-11]

Gigabyte is one of the few brands of motherboards I use (the others being Asus, MSI and rarely Intel). Still have a Gigabyte Socket A board from 2003 that's still working well, though I have no experience with their support staff since I haven't had any of their boards go bad on me yet.

[David M]

Welcome back Xena.

[XenaWP]

Thanks, David.

And thanks, guys, for the replies.

When switching the mobo/RAM/CPU of an existing system, can I just make the hardware switch?

Do I need to do a full reinstall of Vista? ... or will it work just to uninstall the chipset drivers for the Asus/Intel board?

[Khalil]

Most of the times you do not need to reinstall vista, specially if you are staying with AMD or if you had Intel if you were staying with Intel but I have seen it before where you had to do reinstall. Back up your data to an external drive is what I would do before proceeding!
As far as Gigabyte they are on and off, sometimes they can be very prompt and quick to respond other times they can be a bear to deal with, Asus is far more consistant in my experience.
Good luck

[glc]

From a QUALITY standpoint, Gigabyte boards are good.

[XenaWP]

Thanks for chiming in GLC. Always appreciate your advice!

[XenaWP]

And much to my surprise, both the old motherboard (with dead USB, fully disclosed) and CPU sold on Ebay, combined total $90, reducing the original $250 upgrade cost to $160.

Gotta love Ebay.