Intel released its Coffee Lake lineup earlier this year, causing dissatisfaction among customers since Coffee Lake requires a new chipset and motherboard. According to baidu, a modder has successfully booted a Core i3-8350K on an old Z170 motherboard.



When Intel release a new series of CPUs, it's common for the company to offer some form of backwards compatibility. With Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake predecessor, Intel released Z270 chipset motherboards to make the most of its functionality working, but still managed to work on the previous Z170 motherboards. Intel has released a new chipset with Coffee Lake because the power delivery was different and make the motherboard backwards compatibility was impossibile.

This was confirmed by Asus' Andrew Wu, stating that Intel directly dictated the decision to disable CFL-S support for Z170 and Z270 motherboards, but the new line of processors could easily be supported by older models. According to an user on Baidu, it's possibile flash via BIOS the microcode and uses a Coffee Lake processors on an Intel Z170 motherboard. This was confirmed after MSI's Z170A Xpower Titanium was modded to support i3-8350K with microcode changed.

The mod is far from being perfect since the primary PCI-Express doesn't work at all. If these can be fixed by changing drivers, Intel will certainly have some more questions to answer.



Source: Baidu