Intel Finally Extends Optane Support to Pentium and Celeron CPUs
Ron Perillo / 5 years ago
Now Available on Entry Level Builds
Intel has now extended Optane support down to their entry level Pentium and Celeron CPUs.
These of course, have to be 8th Gen or newer, and excludes Kaby Lake or older processors. Furthermore, the CPUs must meet other Optane requirements. Including the presence of a 300-series motherboard chipset and specifically, version 17.2.0.1009 for both Optane Memory driver and RST software.
Keep in mind that the motherboard BIOS must also have support for Optane, so an update might be necessary to get it working on your platform.
What is Intel Optane Anyway?
It is basically an efficient drive caching feature exclusive on new Intel systems. You can see the benchmarks for yourself in an article we published here a few months ago. Basically showing the big improvements on an HDD augmented with Intel Optane.
It is actually surprising that it took Intel this long to implement it on lower cost systems. That is where it seems to fit better since people with money can just opt for much faster and higher capacity M.2 PCIe drives.
