Good question. Personally, I prefer to reinstall whenever making a major hardware change. (I've found that I usually end up boogering something up in the process, and end up having to do it anyway) In this case however, I don't believe changing from one I7 to another should present any issues.


If you've done any kind of BIOS tweaking (ocing etc.) it might be a good idea to revert back to defaults before doing the swap.


I'm by no means an expert though, so waiting for other replies might be a good idea.