Someone managed to get Intel’s 8th-generation chips to run on incompatible motherboards
A group of modders managed to get Coffee Lake to run on older Z170 and Z270 chipsets, but it requires time and a lot of tweaking.
Image Source: Intel
One of the key grouses of Intel’s new 8th-generation processors was the fact that they didn’t work with the older 200-series motherboards. If you wanted a Coffee Lake chip, you’d have to shell out for a completely new Z370 board.
However, it turns out that it’s actually possible to get Coffee Lake to run on older Z170 and Z270 chipsets, but it requires time and a lot of tweaking.
To be clear, this isn’t ideal, as Intel has said that one of the reasons for the incompatibility is that the power requirements between the 7th- and 8th-generation chips differ. After all, there’s been an increase in core count across the board with Coffee Lake, and board makers have had to make design adjustments to account for that.
However, Andrew Wu, a product manager for Republic of Gamers (ROG) motherboards at ASUS, has gone on record saying that the power requirement differences don’t matter that much. He also went on to say that you could get Coffee Lake to run on an older motherboard with an upgrade from the Management Engine (ME) and a BIOS update.
Now, it looks like a group of modders in the Win-Raid forum has succeeded. A forum post on Overclock.net details how to do this, with links to a full guide and the required patches.
Nevertheless, there are still certain limitations. For instance, this method appears to be specific to ASRock motherboards. Furthermore, one of the modders also advised against using this mod with unlocked Core i5 and i7 chips because of their higher power limits, in addition to suggesting using a board with a socketed BIOS chip to reduce the chance of bricking it.
The modders succeeded in getting a lower-end Core i3-8300 processor to boot in a couple of older boards, but not the Core i7-8700 chip. The Core i3 CPU has four cores versus the six on the Core i7, so it may be a power related issue.
The solution involves tweaks to the CPU’s microcode, the iGPU’s UEFI graphics output protocol (GOP) driver, and some ME bootstraps. That said, you should probably approach it with caution, and understand that you’re taking a risk if you do decide to try it.
Source: Overclock.net
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