PC Master Race

20285 readers

8 users here now

A community for PC Master Race.

Rules:

No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No NSFW content.
No Ads / Spamming.
Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘stupid’ questions. The world won’t be made better or worse by snarky comments schooling naive newcomers on Lemmy.

Notes:

PCMR Community Name - Our Response and the Survey

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world

_MoveSwiftly@lemmy.world

Xeon@lemmy.ml

IowaMan@lemmy.world

The_Vampire@lemmy.world

CatZoomies@lemmy.world

geosoco@kbin.social

Fudgeknuckles98@lemmy.world

BobaFett26@lemmy.world

need help shoving a CPU in a pc it's very much not intended to go into (feddit.it)

submitted 1 day ago by brokenlcd@feddit.it to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Around six months ago (and luckily before the whole ram shortage) I managed to scrounge up enough money to build this monstrosity of a machine, based on what I thought was a lenovo thinkcentre m700... More on that further down.

The whole mod works wonderfully. But the problem i'm facing is that the poor i5-6500 it came with just cannot keep up with what i'm doing with it and bottlenecks the whole machine.

Without any mods. The Best CPU i can put into it is an i7-6700. Which is still a 6th gen CPU... But it's still about 70€ where I live. While for some reason I can find a lot of i3-9100. For 20-30€. Which from what I understand are B0 stepping chips and don't require pin modding to be used. And should still be a good upgrade.

The last problem was the BIOS. The bios on this machine is not meant to support such a new chip. But I remember reading people having success with a program called "coffeetime" to shoehorn the microcode to use newer cpus.

When I went to sanity check what the machine's bios said. I found out it's a actually an m800. Not an m700. This raises a problem. Since it's chipset is a q150. That has the problem of having a stricter/ more in depth Intel ME. That from what I managed to find requires somekind of bypass.

Do you think this is still feasible to do? And do you know if there is any safe source for coffeetime / some guide to do this mod by hand? Since having a random software that I can't read the source of modify the bios of my machine feels a bit iffy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] scrion@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Would you do this mainly because you want to figure out if you can, or mostly due to the 40€ price difference?

[–] brokenlcd@feddit.it 2 points 1 day ago

A little bit of both. I generally like to mess with this kind of thing. Plus if I manage to save those 40-50€. It's money I can invest to buy a decent HDD. And move away from the WD green from 2009 I'm currently using in there.

Plus. If I do manage to find enough info. I may try to implement a rudimentary version of coffeetime. So at least the community has an open source variant to do this. Since especially with B0 chips like the one I'm trying to use. It's not that difficult of a process and is mostly drop in hardware wise. The only hiccup I've found is that the software side is lacking. Barring a sketchy binary that roams around some forums.