New pc build do's and dont's

[fiju]

I'm building a new itx rig for gaming and general use. I'm currently running a dual core turion with 6gb ram on windows 10.
The new pc will have a ryzen 3950x with 16gb ram, msi b550i motherboard, gtx670 ftw gpu (temporary), and a Corsair ax860 PSU. I'm going with a noctua u9s cooler as I'm not overclocking. I've done my research and people seem to manage ok. I'll see how it goes and upgrade if necessary.

Ok so first thing I need to do is to get it running. I haven't done this in donkeys years but I remember back in the day you couldn't go swapping hard drives between PC's as it wouldn't recognise the hardware and would need a complete new install of Windows. Is this still the case? If so, is there a solution so I can use my current ssd that's running Windows 10 without having to transfer everything onto a different drive before formatting it?

Once I've got it up and running is there any specific way I should set it up? Any specific software or packages I should download? And bios changes I should make? Anything else I should be aware of?

[rxe]

Windows is a lot better at waking up in a new PC than it used to be. It just starts, realises there is a load of new stuff and gets the drivers. In the old days it just blew up somewhere in the boot cycle.

However, Windows also degrades fast - I’d take the opportunity to rebuild it.

[130R]

Your existing Windows 10 install should pick up the new hardware and just work. Usually you don't need to do anything. In the BIOS you will want to enable XMP for the RAM.

rxe said:

However, Windows also degrades fast - I’d take the opportunity to rebuild it.

It doesn't degrade and there is no need to reinstall these days. I have been running the same windows 10 install for years and years and that was originally windows 7 (which I upgraded).

[fiju]

I haven't noticed any degradation since since windows 7 probably. Certainly not on windows 10. The current install has only been going for a year.

Yes thanks, I know about XMP. Any other things worth messing with? Programs for optimisation?

[The_Jackal]

If you are swapping a hard drive straight over, I wouldnt worry about optimizing.
If you really want the best start, install Win10 from scratch and only install what you need to.
Its up to you what advice you take.
I've built and supported 1000s of PCs, and I know what I'd do on my personal machine.

Plus with the speed of SSDs these days, it is soo much quicker than it used to be.

[snuffy]

I've just built a new PC the week before Christmas ( https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&... ) and I just swapped all the disks over.

When it first fired up, it crashed with some driver error and then rebooted and worked fine.

However, I decided to reinstall Windows onto a nice new 980 Pro M2 drive (seemed rude not to as my new PC now can support a PCIe 4.0 drive) after a few days. I just had to enter my Windows account details and it re-activated itself.

I had to make two BIOS changes; one was for legacy drive supposed - the BIOS would see my Windows drive but said it was not bootable (when it was). CSM it was called and after enabling that then it would boot.

Also I had to enable DOCP from the RAM (just a different term for XMP memory profiles) to get the RAM to run at full speed.

Edited by snuffy on Friday 1st January 00:34

[durbster]

I treated myself to a brand new PC last year for the first time since I stepped out of the arms race in about 2011.

I used to build my own PCs back in the day so I'd done my backups and prepared a Windows 10 installation thumb drive, then took the eight year old SSD drive out of my old PC and figured there was nothing to lose by popping it in the new PC and seeing what happened. To my amazement, it just booted up.

There was a minor faff with picking up the Windows 10 licence but that was easily resolved and then it just worked everything out itself. It's been running faultlessly for over six months now.

Although I cheated a bit by buying a barebones system where the CPU and motherboard are already installed, everything else was much easier than it used to be.