A good while back, I built my father a system using an Asus A7V8X. It was recently thwacked by a lightning strike, so I'm going to replace it. I originally bought and used some of the A7V8X features (Firewire, RAID, etc) but he doesn't need any of that.

The only thing I can find available quickly is the A7V8X-X, which is the same board but does NOT have RAID or firewire. The whole point of using the same mobo is to make it software compatible -- no reinstall necessary.

If I replace the A7V8X with an A7V8X-X, I'm *hoping* that the only Bad Things that will happen is windows complaining that the firewire port and the SATA RAID controller have gone "missing" and that's all -- which is no problem for me.

Does anyone know if this is actually what will happen? Thanks much.

I just parted ways with my own A7V8X after years of reliable use. Good board. I didn't have the SATA or RAID though.

Assuming you are running XP, and weren't using the RAID controller, you should have no problem swaping out boards. When XP doesn't find the controllers, it will simply remove the devices from the Device Manager.

If however you *were* using the RAID to run two drives in parallel (stripe-0) to speed things up, you'll have to connect those drives to another RAID to accesses them or else you loose everything.

But since you say you weren't using them, you're fine (I've changed MB's completely with the same C: drive and XP just configured everything automatically.