Published in PC Hardware

Intel Z370 motherboards do not support Kaby Lake CPUs

by on20 September 2017


Only for Coffee Lake CPUs

As some of the first Coffee Lake samples have reached reviewers it was just a matter of time before someone tried to run a Kaby Lake CPU with the new Z370 chipset based motherboard, and it does not work, at least not yet.

While there is no official confirmation from Intel that Z370 chipset motherboards will only support Coffee Lake CPUs and won't be backward compatible with Kaby Lake CPUs, some reviewers have already tried to run some Kaby Lake CPUs in a new Z370 motherboard.

Hardware.info site tried to boot up a Kaby Lake-based Celeron G3930, which fits perfectly into the "new" LGA 1151 socket but the motherboard simply did not boot and got stuck at VGA detection stage.

Since the new Coffee Lake CPUs can only be used on the Z370 chipset motherboards and won't be compatible with Z270 motherboards, this move from Intel does not come as a big surprise.

Intel could theoretically give a green light to motherboard manufacturers to enable backward compatibility with a BIOS update in future but we simply don't see that happening.

intel kabylakecoffeelake 1

 

Last modified on 24 April 2018
Rate this item
(0 votes)