I have an Acer machine and I am keen to swap out the mobo for something a bit more 'flexible' and not limited to 8x PCI-E as the proprietary Mobo is. I have no XP disc; just a recovery DVD but my Vista Home Premium upgrade is due this wek.
Question is; if I swap the Mobo then put the upgrade DVD in, will it recognise the lack of Acer Mobo and fail to install? I want to do a clean install anyway rather than an upgrade..is this normally possible or does the install really need to 'see' the existing XP installation?

Many thanks in advance.

The reason you gave for this motherboard swap is not tenable enough - the difference when you are gaming between 8x & 16x is marginal at best & you'll be hard pressed to notice it.

Keep your existing motherboard.

You're messing with the wrong guy

What Sabertooth said. Plus, you said that your current motherboard is proprietary. That means you wouldn't be able to use a standard board anyway.

Pentium III--Descendant of Intel Core.
Pentium III-S 1400 @ 1.63GHz, 512K L2
X800XT AIW OC 580/600
2GB of RAM
250GB HD
SB Audigy 2
QDI Advance 12 mobo
Smugly running Vista

Sorry, my mistake. What I should have said was, the mobo is made by ECS but labelled as ACER and as such has limited functionality and tweaking. Particularly bad is access to any BIOS upgrades and support is pretty naff too.
I had some PC troubles which I thought could be related to the Mobo, that is my main reason for wanting to swap it. It is in it's warranty period but I put a better PSU in which 'voids' the warranty according to the manufacturer.
Cheers for replies.

Actually guys, I am having trouble running my graphics card on this Mobo but the card runs on another machine. I am happy to drop another £40+ on a mobo as long as my OS update will install on it.