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In a video, der8auer focused on Intel’s socket 1151v2. In the tests he proved that the socket and the chipsets are unnecessary.

Intel’s mainboard policy aims only for profits

With the Coffee Lake generation, Intel has also introduced a new chipset called Z370. That’s nothing unusual, but with the new generation there was a big drawback. Officially, the Coffee Lake processors are not compatible with the older Z170 and Z270 mainboards. However, the socket has not changed. Intel still uses 1151 pins and the same design. The company already argued at that time that a change was necessary because of the higher energy requirement of the new six-core processors, which came on the market with Coffee Lake. So the layout of the pins is somewhat different. There are a total of 18 more pins for the power supply, while 14 additional pins serve as ground.

Already after the launch of the Coffee Lake processors, several hardware enthusiasts succeeded in getting the new processors to run on actually incompatible motherboards. For example, an i3-8350K ran smoothly on a Z170 motherboard, while Kaby Lake processors ran on Z370 motherboards. The same applies to the new Coffee Lake Refresh series. Even the top model i9-9900K with eight cores and 16 threads runs with some changes at 5.5 GHz on a Z170 mainboard. The extreme overclocker Roman Hartung, better known as der8auer, has now explored the 1151v2 socket in an extensive video and found out some very interesting things.

der8auer tests current load on pins

To follow Intel’s argumentation, Roman first removed a pin from a defective socket of a Z370 mainboard from EVGA. He then applied different currents to the pin. In theory, each pin would have to withstand 1.01 amperes in the Prime95 test of an i9-9900K overclocked with 1.35 volts. On Z270 with fewer power supply pins, this value increases to 1.15 amps per pin. First der8auer applied 1 Ampere current to the pin. The pin warmed up to 30 degrees Celsius. Also on 2 Ampere the temperature was only on about 30 degrees Celsius. As maximum load a test at 5 Ampere followed afterwards and thus well the fivefold current strength, which runs otherwise over a pin. Here the pin warmed up clearly to 53 degrees Celsius.

In the next test, Hartung artificially limited the power supply of the processor. He simply taped 18 pins on the downside of an i9-9900K to restore the same status as the Z270. He then tested in this configuration. Neither the socket nor the processor behaved differently or were damaged. Even more taped pins don’t make a difference. der8auer also tested with 28, 38, 45, 56 and 69 taped pins. In the most extreme version, almost 50 percent of the power supply pins are not in use, which means a load of 1.92 ampere per pin. And even in this test environment, neither the processor nor the socket suffered any visible damage or disadvantages after six hours of continuous testing.

LGA-1151v2 is absolutely unnecessary

Roman Hartung has proven very clearly that the LGA-1151v2 socket is basically completely unnecessary. The pins withstand even a very limited power supply without any problems, there is no damage to the mainboard, the socket or the processor. This also proves once more that Intel probably didn’t allow compatibility with the old motherboards for sales reasons.