News Modder Runs Coffee Lake CPU in a Kaby Lake/Skylake Motherboard

dtemple

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This mod has significant relevance, 8th and 9th gen meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11 while 7th does not. If TPM2.0 compatibility is intact, this brings someone's 2016-2017 build into official compatibility ahead of Microsoft dropping Windows 10 support in 2025.
 
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edzieba

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This mod has been in the wild (and variants that use shunts elsewhere rather than on the CPU pads) for several years. The problem is that the socket specs (e.g. power delivery) are not the same between sockets. It is luck of the draw if a given motherboard - that is within spec for Kaby Lake / Skylake - happens to also be in-spec for Coffee Lake. To make the two sockets intercompatible would have meant either a "consult the manufacture" model-number-bingo buck-passing cluster-<Mod Edit>where it's random chance if your existing motherboard will accept an updated CPU or not, or hobbling the Coffee Lake board specs to allow the lowest common denominators of the existing boards to function reliably.
 

Pollopesca

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But if 8th and 9th gen would work on a 6th gen board, People wouldn’t buy more motherboards for the newer generations! /s

Engineering e-waste is more profitable. I’m very surprised to see 14th gen CPU compatibility for 12th gen boards. Hope to see more of this in the future.
 

setx

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It's hilarious how out of touch authors here are. The mod dates back to early 2018!
I was using it myself some years ago but long updated since then.

This mod has significant relevance, 8th and 9th gen meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11 while 7th does not. If TPM2.0 compatibility is intact, this brings someone's 2016-2017 build into official compatibility ahead of Microsoft dropping Windows 10 support in 2025.
First of all, fTPM very often doesn't work with this mod as often you have to disable ME and that kills fTPM.
Second, CPU itself (and fTPM) is irrelevant if you use TPM as separate chip. Many motherboards have such TPM connector and the module itself can be bought separately with no problem. This works as well with 7th gen and earlier.
Also, "official support" is overrated – it just forces hardware manufactures, but have little benefit for end users if you don't trust Windows' encryption. (And why should you trust it?)

The problem is that the socket specs (e.g. power delivery) are not the same between sockets. It is luck of the draw if a given motherboard - that is within spec for Kaby Lake / Skylake - happens to also be in-spec for Coffee Lake.
That's not true in practice. Since you can set power limits in bios (and by software if it's missing), pretty much all boards are "compatible" with Coffee Lake by power, but might limit clocks for heavy loads like all-core AVX.
 

bit_user

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This mod has been in the wild (and variants that use shunts elsewhere rather than on the CPU pads) for several years. The problem is that the socket specs (e.g. power delivery) are not the same between sockets.
I saw a news article on this site, several years ago, about and industrial board that officially supported all 4 generations. However, it was released after Coffee Lake and its updated power requirements - as opposed to the mods which apply to boards released before then. I'd try to find it, but the search feature of this site is almost unusable.
 
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edzieba

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That's not true in practice. Since you can set power limits in bios (and by software if it's missing), pretty much all boards are "compatible" with Coffee Lake by power, but might limit clocks for heavy loads like all-core AVX.
That falls under the 'hobble Coffee Lake' category: either you set the new CPU power defaults to a clamped lower value and require user intervention to raise power limits to normal, or you set the power limits as intended and rely on users going into the BIOS and setting the lower limits to avoid in spec boards popping from overdraw. Or you tell new CPUs to refuse to even POST without a specific BIOS revision, and have to deal with nonsense like AMD did with AM4 and needing to mail out loan CPUs to users to allow BIOS flashing for fresh-out-of-the-box boards and publishing compatibility matrices with BIOS-version-dependant asterisking just to tell if a given CPU will POST in a given board.
 

setx

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Or you tell new CPUs to refuse to even POST without a specific BIOS revision, and have to deal with nonsense like AMD did with AM4 and needing to mail out loan CPUs to users to allow BIOS flashing for fresh-out-of-the-box boards and publishing compatibility matrices with BIOS-version-dependant asterisking just to tell if a given CPU will POST in a given board.
Or you do as Intel did and refuse to start the CPU in all the boards, even top ones where they definitely can work perfectly fine. It's an old tale, don't even start...
 

edzieba

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Or you do as Intel did and refuse to start the CPU in all the boards, even top ones where they definitely can work perfectly fine. It's an old tale, don't even start...
That was my point, yes. Rather than pointing consumers at a crazed wall of polaroids and red string to figure out if a given CPU works in a given motherboard (with a given BIOS revision), they went with "These two chipset gens (1xx, 2xx) work with these two CPU gens (Skylake, Kaby Lake), others do not" as they have for the past decade.
 
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lolvatveo

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we can use broadwell on h81/b85/z87 mobo with latest intel me (of course latest ucode) the problem is intel me, not any different socket voltage alloc cpu pin problem etc like intel say. but no one realize this trick at that time
 
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