If you own an Intel motherboard with a Z170 or Z270 chipset, you might believe that it only supports CPUs up to Intel’s 7th generation, known as Kaby Lake. Even the CPU socket’s pinout is different in the next generation — we are told, it will fit the same socket, but it won’t boot. So if you want a newer CPU, you’ll have to buy a new motherboard while you’re at it. Or do you?

Turns out, the difference in the socket is just a few pins here and there, and you can make a 8th or 9th generation Coffee Lake CPU work on your Z170/270 board if you apply a few Kapton tape fixes and mod your BIOS, in a process you can find as “Coffee Mod”. You can even preserve compatibility with the 6th/7th generation CPUs after doing this mod, should you ever need to go back to an older chip. Contrasting this to AMD’s high degree of CPU support on even old Ryzen motherboards, it’s as if Intel introduced this incompatibility intentionally.

There’s been a number of posts on various PC forums and YouTube videos, going through the process and showing off the tools used to modify the BIOS. Some mods are exceptionally easy to apply. For example, if you have the Asus Maximus VIII Ranger motherboard, a single jumper wire between two pads next to the EC will enable support without Kapton tape, a mod that likely could be figured out for other similar motherboards as well. There’s a few aspects to keep in mind, like making sure your board’s VRMs are good enough for the new chip, and a little more patching might be needed for hyper-threading, but nothing too involved.

Between money-grab features like this that hamper even the simplest of upgrades and increase e-waste, fun vulnerabilities, and inability to sort out problems like stability power consumption issues, it’s reassuring to see users take back control over their platforms wherever possible, and brings us back to the days of modding Xeon CPUs to fit into 775 sockets.

Don’t get too excited though, as projects like Intel BootGuard are bound to hamper mods like this on newer generations by introducing digital signing for BIOS images, flying under the banner of user security yet again. Alas, it appears way more likely that Intel’s financial security is the culprit.

We thank [Lexi] for sharing this with us!

When the first Raspberry Pi came out back in 2012 it was groundbreaking because it offered a usable little Linux machine with the proud boast of a $25 dollar price tag. Sure it wasn’t the fastest kid on the block, but there was almost nothing at that price which could do what it did. Three leap years later though it’s surrounded by a host of competitors with similar hardware, and its top-end model now costs several times that original list price.

Meanwhile the cost of a “real” x86 computer such as those based upon the Intel N100 has dropped to the point at which it almost matches a fully tricked-out Pi with storage and peripherals, so does the Pi still hold its own? [CNX Software] has taken a look.

From the examples they use, in both cases the Intel machine is a little more expensive than the Pi, but comes with the advantage of all the peripherals, cooling, and storage coming built-in rather than add-ons. They rate the Pi as having the advantage on expandability as we’d expect, but the Intel giving a better bang for the buck in performance terms. From where we’re sitting the advantage of the Pi over most of its ARM competition has always been its good OS support, something which is probably exceeded by that on an x86 platform.

So, would you buy the Intel over the high-end Pi? Let us know in the comments.