30 tips on upgrading a motherboard

It happens to all of us eventually, the ExtremeTech staff probably more than most. Whether due to failure or obsolescence—or after you've run out of alternative upgrade paths—it comes time to pull a motherboard out of a working system and replace it with something different.

That's a job. It requires you to pull all of your expansion cards, disconnect and work around all the cabling, wrest the big board from sometimes-tight quarters within a case, prep the new board, wiggle it into that possibly cramped quarter, and, when you think you're all done, you still have to coax Windows through the trauma of waking up with new hardware..