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ASRock: Coffee Lake CPUs not compatible with 200 series motherboards

happy medium said:
and my bet is the z370 will be for the 8700 series only, no real upgrade path.
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Doesn't much matter to me. I tend to keep systems for a fairly long time so an upgrade almost always includes a new motherboard and RAM along with a new CPU. Last system before April 2017 was an i72600k with DDR3 built in April 2011. Before that it was a Core 2 quad 6600 with DDR2.
 
How often do you change CPU on a mother board?

I do agree that Intel should have given an upgrade path by making coffee lake compatible with x170 & x270 chipset but does it really matter beyond the enthusiast community?

Most regular people upgrade motherboard, CPU and RAM together and keep it for few years. If that's the case then those regular people will keep their current Socket 1151 CPU for a long time.

I guess it was a wise decision to buy Core i7 7700 to replace my Core i5 7500 on my same B150 chipset based motherboard during the short price decrease due to Ryzen, in India.
 
You should ask yourself if you really need that 6 core coffeelake if you've got a 6700k. It's not a CPU requiring upgrade. Intel probably knows the number of people doing CPU upgrades is negligible so it doesn't care about them.

AMD decided to reuse AM4 instead of introducing new socket and prevented its users from utilizing all available PCIe lanes. So there is always a tradeoff. I prefer to be able to use all new features.
 
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Not at all surprised. I thought this was a known thing though that CFL wouldn't be compatible with z170/z270
 
ddogg said:
Not at all surprised. I thought this was a known thing though that CFL wouldn't be compatible with z170/z270
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Nope, just a few months ago I had Pro-Intel guys telling me they thought it would be compatible, this recent announcement is the first confirmation that it's not the case.
 
I'm mildly disappointed, but only because that means new boards and chipsets with new teething problems instead of using existing Z70 boards that have already gotten their BIOS updates and minor revisions out of the way.
 
Ratman6161 said:
Doesn't much matter to me. I tend to keep systems for a fairly long time so an upgrade almost always includes a new motherboard and RAM along with a new CPU. Last system before April 2017 was an i72600k with DDR3 built in April 2011. Before that it was a Core 2 quad 6600 with DDR2.
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Yeah, I used to do incremental upgrades back in the Socket A days. Today, not so much. These CPUs are fine for all but the super enthusiasts. I'll admit I'm an enthusiast, but don't upgrade annually. I usually replace stuff as parts die or platforms become obsolete. My i7 920 went from 2009 to January 2015 when I replaced it with the i7 4790K (rig in my sig). It's now been 2 1/2 years and still no reason to upgrade anything other than the video card and that would only be if I moved to 4K.
 
Motherboards typically lacking CPU upgrade options is why I always recommend getting one of the best CPUs immediately.
Only time I've found backwards compatibility really neat was back when AM3 CPUs worked in AM2 motherboards, so one could replace an Athlon 64 X2 with a Phenom II X4.
 
Not at all surprising, yet still... extremely annoying at the same time. Typical Intel.

I'm still waiting to upgrade my 2500k, so 6 core Coffee lake is still in my sights but yeah, a Ryzen system with more cores and a likely better upgrade path for ~30% less money (an 1800x is freakin $350 now) seems like the obvious better choice.

Seriously how often do motherboards need to be upgraded? What do people really need? Any board with freakin USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 is still fine for 99% of use cases.
 
Incompatibility of 200 series is nothing new for informed people but it's nice to have a confirmation.
 
They really have no excuses to do this. CFL-S is KBL-S + 2 cores. This is also the worse possible moment to do this as well.

happy medium said:
I must admit AMD is looking better everyday.
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To someone that has zero memory maybe. Lets have a minute of silence for all people who brought 754, 939, AM2, AM1, AM3, FM1, FM2.

I dont trust AMD with the sockets either, they may slap a "+" on the name at any moment and you would be left at the mercy of the OEMs.
 
Shivansps said:
To someone that has zero memory maybe. Lets have a minute of silence for all people who brought 754, 939, AM2, AM1, AM3, FM1, FM2.
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At least, those were all compatible, within their namesake platforms.

Intel 775? Which variant? P4? Core2? Core2 45nm? All effectively different sockets as far as compatibility went.

At the very least, AMD was decent enough to slap a "+" onto their extended socket versions. With Intel, you had to check individual board and CPU compatibility. It wasn't nearly as simple as AMD.

Granted, AMD boards had 95W versus 125W versus 140W, that was a board-level issue too, but only when using a CPU with extended TDPs or overclocking.
 
VirtualLarry said:
At least, those were all compatible, within their namesake platforms.

Intel 775? Which variant? P4? Core2? Core2 45nm? All effectively different sockets as far as compatibility went.

At the very least, AMD was decent enough to slap a "+" onto their extended socket versions. With Intel, you had to check individual board and CPU compatibility. It wasn't nearly as simple as AMD.

Granted, AMD boards had 95W versus 125W versus 140W, that was a board-level issue too, but only when using a CPU with extended TDPs or overclocking.
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Ironically, in the 754, 939 and AM2 era, Intel was seeing as the best in this because they keep the 775 socket and you could slap a old cpu intro a new mb.

They were not compatible, 754 and 939 users got screwed, badly, most AM2 boards could be never upgraded to place a AM2+ cpu on them, yeah, you could place a AM2 cpu intro AM2+ board, yeah, FM1 lasted a year and replaced by FM2... some FM2 boards could not be upgraded to accept FM2+ cpus, depended on OEM, with AM3? the exact same thing, this time im going to take the risk and say that almost no AM3 MB could be upgraded to accept AM3+ cpus. AM1 had no upgrade at all.

And Intel did the same, with 775 chipsets, 1155 and 1156... etc.

As a hardware collector you should know this.

Who is willing to ensure that AMD will not launch a "AM4+"? tecnically is not changing the socket, but compatibility depends on OEM. They did this several times now and got burned twice, so im not placing my hands on the fire for them this time.
 
Shivansps said:
They really have no excuses to do this. CFL-S is KBL-S + 2 cores. .
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Well the original thought was that the 100/200 series chips were designed around quad cores max and they need to make some physical changes to support 6 cores. Maybe they then decided to change the power delivery for some benefit. You have to remember that Coffee Lake only came about because they didn't want to go ahead with Cannonlake beyond the dual core, so it would not have been something they would have planned for.

The nice thing about not doing backwards compatibility is you don't have to worry about decisions made a long time ago.
 
Sonikku said:
AMD seems like a better value all the time.
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It will be interesting to see if AMD have caught up on overclockability by the time Zen 2 rolls around, if Intel will still be doing this sort of thing?

Perhaps there is a genuine technical reason for why 200 series motherboards can't run Coffeelake, but call me sceptical about that.
 
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