Even though Coffee Lake is pin compatible with older LGA 1151 motherboards, the official word from Intel is that the power requirements differ, and as such Coffee Lake only works in newer motherboards based on Intel's Z370 chipset.
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Andrew Wu, product manager for Republic of Gamers (ROG) motherboards at Asus, told Bit-Tech in October that it was "Intel's decision" not to support Coffee Lake on older boards.
As far as Wu was concerned when he made those comments, getting Coffee Lake to run on older motherboards would be possible with "an upgrade from the ME [Management Engine] and a BIOS update."
Since then, there have been attempts to get Coffee Lake CPUs to run in Z270 and Z170 motherboards with limited success.
It is a fairly involved process and specific to ASRock motherboards, which the modders claim "have proven to work well" with the steps that are outlined.
Because of higher power limits I would not suggest this mod with i5 and i7 K series CPUs," one of the modders wrote.
In short, getting a Coffee Lake processor to run in an older motherboard requires making tweaks to the CPU's microcode, the iGPU's UEFI GOP driver, and some Management Engine bootstraps.
- Intel Coffee Lake Processors Can Work In 100- And 200- Series Motherboards ...Techgage
- Modders manage to run Coffee Lake CPUs on older 200/100-series mobosNotebookcheck.net (press release)
- Modders get Coffee Lake CPU running on 200/100-series chipset motherboardsTechSpot
- Affordable Intel Coffee Lake Motherboards To Hit Retail SoonShacknews
- How To Get Intel Coffee Lake CPUs Working On Skylake And Kaby Lake MotherboardsSegmentNext
- Intel's Coffee Lake has been modded to work with a 100-series motherboardPCGamesN
- Modders Successfully Get Intel Coffee Lake Chips To Run On Intel Skylake/Kaby ...SegmentNext
- Tweakers Get Coffee Lake Procs Going on Series 200 and even 100 Chipset ...guru3d.com (press release)
- Coffee Lake CPUs stable on modded 100, 200 series chipsetsHEXUS
