ASRock Confirms Intel Coffee Lake Incompatible with 200-Series Boards

Intel‘s upcoming next-generation mainstream desktop processors code name ‘Coffee Lake’ shares many similarities to current Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs. This includes using the same 14nm process and LGA1151 socket. However, it will require a new 300-series mainboard to run. This confirmation comes from the official ASRock account via Twitter. That is unfortunate news for those looking to upgrade incrementally or have a Z270 motherboard on-hand.

That is not really surprising. It is not beyond Intel’s tradition since they tend to provide new motherboards each generation. The real question to ask is, if whether Kaby Lake and Sky Lake CPUs will be compatible with 300-series motherboards.

Coffee Lake Features

Coffee Lake brings 6-core CPUs for the first time to Intel’s mainstream desktop line. It is not just the Core i7 either, but the Core i5 as well which will get hexacore options. The platform will remain dual-channel, leaving the quad-channel support to their HEDT X299 platform. The new 300-series motherboard chipset also brings native 10Gbps USB 3.1 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi support. If Intel does decide that Kaby Lake and Sky Lake CPUs are compatible with 300-series boards, naturally, these features will not be enabled.  There is not much expected in terms of chipset improvements beyond those two unfortunately. The PCIe lanes count remains at 24 for the chipset (30 HSIO) with 1×16 or 2×8 or 1×8+2×4 for the graphics.