"Tim Taylor" More Power-ing an ASUS ROG GR8 II with E3 processor

[mr.speedcraft]

Hi. The ASUS ROG GR8ii uses 7th gen Core i5 and core i7 processors. It is a waste of our resources to upgrade our core i5-7400 to the i7-7700k. However, we have an E3-1240 V6 processor we could drop in and take the CPUMark to over 10,000. We do this regularly back and forth on other ASUS motherboards for this generation with full support on the Support page of ASUS.

ASUS will not comment on changing the processor in this consumer appliance. Not even about upgrading to the i7 which is known supported. They say to go to a repair center and ask for the i7 upgrade. Yeah. Right.

Is there anything preventing us from doing this mod? ECC RAM may be an issue since the tiny box usues SODIMMs.

Also, we can't find in the BIOS a way to turn on the on-CPU graphics of the i5. ASUS has disabled them since there is a rather nice GPU attached. However, we need a few business-type monitors via the USB C port. Other systems have a BIOS setting. If we could turn it on, we could go with the E3-1285 v6 that has onboard HD graphics.

Budget is not a concern. DIY is paramount.

 

[popatim]

I doubt that Asus would have run the iGPU wiring to an external socket otherwise it would have supported that feature as a bonus since the i5/i7 also have iGPU's. If you don't have the Displayport logo (Looks like a capitol D with a dot in the center) next to the USB-c port then you do not have a graphics capable port and it its strictly data and you will need to use an external GPU solution.

As for the processor, it may not work long term since the Xeon is a 79w part and the best i7 the pc supports is 65w. The power delivery circuitry and cooling system may not handle the extra load and throttle or burn out.