Modders manage to run Coffee Lake CPUs on older 200/100-series mobos

Back in Q3 2017 when Intel was launching the gen 8 Coffee Lake desktop CPUs, the company specifically pointed out that the new processors require the latest 300-series motherboards, because of the increased consumption brought by the 6-core/12-thread designs. Fans were quite disappointed to learn this critical detail, but this did not impede the overall sales at all. Meanwhile, modders have managed to run Coffee Lake CPUs on the older 200/100 platforms only employing some software upgrades.

Known as rootuser123, LittleHill, dsanke, elisw, Mov AX, and 0xDEAD on the overclocker.net forums, the modders succeeded in running a 4-core/8-thread i3-8100 CPU on both 200 and 100-series mobos. All they needed to do to stably run the CPU was to add the Coffee Lake microcodes, the iGPU UEFI GOP driver and a few Management Engine bootstraps to the 200/11-series motherboard BIOS. Since the i5/i7 CPUs require more power, the modders pointed out that these CPUs could be running into some issues. Nevertheless, they will still try to run some non-K (locked) i5/i7 CPU, as these require less power than their unlocked counterparts.

Apparently, Intel could have spent a bit more time adapting the new gen 8 CPUs to the older chipsets. However, AMD’s Ryzen was already outselling Intel’s gen 7 CPUs and the company could have been hard-pressed to come up with a solution in a limited timeframe.

Source(s)