I undertook a sizeable upgrade today, bringing a skylake era build into the 2020s with a 13th gen. All core components- memory, motherboard, GPU, everything must go… except the drives. We were nervous, my friend really felt we should reinstall. There was debate, and drama. Considerations and exceptions. No, I couldn’t let my OS go. I have spent years tweaking and tuning, molding my ideal computing environment. We pushed forward.
Well I’m pleased to say it was mostly uneventful. The ethernet adapter was renamed causing misconfigured dhcp, but otherwise it booted right up like nothing happened. Sorry, linux is boring now.
Motherboards are tough to recommend because it really depends what you need from your system. My approach was to choose a CPU first then I could start looking at boards supporting the socket. I wanted ATX, nothing smaller. Memory support, just DDR5 and room to expand (it turns out most boards will handle like 192GB these days lol). I wanted the ability to change CPU frequency, that eliminated boards with a B-series chipsets. Next SSD support (at least 3x m.2) and USB ports (minimum 6x USB 3.0). Finally price, I didn’t want to exceed $250.
When all that was dialed in, I was left with like 8 options, from there it was manageable to read reviews for the nuance between them.
