this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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PC Master Race

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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.

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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I got no advice on coffeetime, sorry. But I’d keep a lookout for Skylake Xeons, or maybe whole motherboards with embedded CPUs.

Also, on your heating troubles, you can definitely undervolt Ampere. The cards are designed to clock up to high temperatures and stay there, but your 3060 will work better undervolted and capped at a reasonable clockspeed. I’d recommend the MSI Afterburner's curve optimizer on Windows, and a pyNVML script on Linux.

May I recommend a duct too? I have my 3090 “sealed” against the edge of the case with weather sealing strip foam, and it pulls in ambient air from a different spot where everything is exhausted. This is especially nice because it cuts down on noise, and your GPU fans become “case fans.”