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I know that 8th gen intel processors need the 3 series chipsets. But will a 6th gen work in a Z370 board? I haven't seen anything about that.

I've heard conflicting reports. The common theme of the negative ones is that it is going to be purely an artificial limitation imposed by Intel.

I think the reverse is true to the extent of DDR4 mother boards. I do think that Intel is dropping DDR3 support so there would be some socket 1151 boards that it wouldn't work on. The good news is that most Z170 and Z270 boards were DDR4 so this wouldn't be as big of an issue for end users. I think majority of the Sky Lake/Kaby Lake systems that use DDR3 were laptops.

https://www.pcper.com/news/Processors/A ... 0-Chipsets

Intel purportedly bringing back the Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator on Coffee, breaking compatibility with Sky/Kaby.

ColeLT1 wrote:

Intel purportedly bringing back the Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator on Coffee, breaking compatibility with Sky/Kaby.

I've seen conjecture about this in forum posts and comments but no official word from Intel or even any rumors that it was true (aside from this post).

ozzuneoj wrote:

ColeLT1 wrote:

Intel purportedly bringing back the Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator on Coffee, breaking compatibility with Sky/Kaby.

I've seen conjecture about this in forum posts and comments but no official word from Intel or even any rumors that it was true (aside from this post).

Intel is tight lipped about it, October 5 is only 6 days away though.

I've seen reports that it's nothing more than an artificial firmware limitation. Doesn't look to be a FIVR issue at all at this point as it would have been stated/known by now.

Kougar wrote:

I've seen reports that it's nothing more than an artificial firmware limitation. Doesn't look to be a FIVR issue at all at this point as it would have been stated/known by now.

You're a bit late on this: it appears that what used to be reserved and unused on the original 1151 layout are now actually used for power.

I guess the extra two cores really did need some changes on the power delivery to the CPU.

Noinoi wrote:

Kougar wrote:

I've seen reports that it's nothing more than an artificial firmware limitation. Doesn't look to be a FIVR issue at all at this point as it would have been stated/known by now.

You're a bit late on this: it appears that what used to be reserved and unused on the original 1151 layout are now actually used for power.

Ah, good to see. Not read anything on my usual sites or TR about it yet.

Even if Z370 supported the 6/7 series CPUs, the potential customer base buying those two together would be close to non-existent when the entire CFL lineup utterly trounces the old.

strangerguy wrote:

Even if Z370 supported the 6/7 series CPUs, the potential customer base buying those two together would be close to non-existent when the entire CFL lineup utterly trounces the old.

This plus as far as I can tell the z370 boards announced so far are virtually identical to existing z270 boards. Not seeing a lot of reason to put a 7 series CPU in one of these boards: even if it works, what do you gain?

It has pretty much been confirmed that Coffee Lake/3 series motherboards use a different version of Socket 1151 (keyed differently) so it is not physically/electrically compatible with Skylake/Kaby Lake chips. It will probably be referred informally as Socket1151v2.

Intel did something similar with Socket 2011 during launch of Haswell-E chips/X99 platform. They changed the socket around slightly which made it no longer able to work with earlier Socket 2011 chips and vice versa. It became known as Socket2011v3.

I've heard they are changing a lot of pins usages so if true, then I believe backwards compatibility to be nixed.

Tried looking at a Z370 board on ASUS' cpu support website and it only showed 8 series CPUs. Looks like no dice for Sandy and Kaby on Z370.
https://www.asus.com/support/cpu_support