Yesterday I bought some RAM for my server to double it from 8GB to 16GB. RAM is dirt cheap, in fact 16GB was only $54 at the local Microcenter and I had a bad drive I needed to return for the same price. After swapping one type of memory for another I gleefully drove home excited to be able to run all my virtual machines at once only to find out that the motherboard only takes 8GB of RAM. Well, I’d been thinking about swapping parts between my less used gaming PC which has a 3 core AMD proc and 4 DDR3 slots with support for 32GB. While I was contemplating how well Windows would handle a complete chipset and platform swap my decided to commit suicide. I literally jumped in my seat when the power supply popped. Great, I had no spare power supplies. Back to Microcenter in rush hour traffic … After a few hours of swapping, backing up, imaging, and loading drivers I managed to switch both a Windows 2008 and Windows 7 server and PC to completely different CPU platforms. The server went from Intel –> AMD and vice versa for the Win7 PC. I had no issues at all. I don’t recommend it, but I really didn’t want to reload either.
Here’s what I ended up with.
Windows Server 2008 R2
| ?Before | After |
| ?Intel Celeron e3400 2.6GHz | ?AMD Phenom II x3 720 2.8GHz (unlocked 4th core) |
| ?8GB DDR3 | ?24GB DDR3 |
Windows 7 PC
| ?Before | After |
| ?AMD Phenom II x3 720 2.8GHz | ?Intel Celeron e3400 3.1GHz |
| ?4GB DDR3 | ?4GB DDR3 |
