If I were to switch my motherboard, etc...

Kindly keep us updated on how things are going. We could use some help here on this topic.

Thanks in advance

SquirrelTakos said:

Also, I realize that this won't make a staggering impact on my performance, but that's not exactly the point. I am preparing myself for any new upgrades I plan to make as well.

That's a very common mistake people in your shoes make. Call it trigger-finger-syndrome...or whatever.

Bottom line is, don't waste your money. It never makes sense to spend money on upgrades that don't give immediately performance. What you would buy now would most certainly be replaced by new available models when you are ready to buy the rest of the parts. For example, you'll spend money on a motherboard now. In time, when you are ready to buy the remaining parts, that motherboard will already be outdated, with either a new chipset...new options, or at the worst...the same motherboard will be cheaper. Either way, there's no logic in doing it now as opposed to when you are ready to buy all the parts you need.

Then you can do one clean install and be done with it.

Regardless of the opinions avoiding this, I did it anyway, and everything worked without a hitch. I just made sure that the BIOS settings matched everything I had on my old board and booted it up straight to my previously installed OS.

I installed the drivers for the sound card, chipset, NIC, usb3.0 and I haven't had any issues. I wound up buying another gigabyte board, by chance, and whether that helped or not, everything worked perfectly. I've only been running for a few hours, but I'm sure that everything is functioning fine. Device manager is showing no problems.

Thanks again for everyone's input. I'm sure an AMD to Intel motherboard switch would be a bigger deal than this, but I guess I proved that it's pretty painless to do this operation. Very soon I will upgrade my video card and be back in business.