Motherboard Manufacturer’s May Allow Intel’s Devil’s Canyon CPU Support on Z87 Motherboards

Motherboard Manufacturer’s May Allow Intel’s Devil’s Canyon CPU Support on Z87 Motherboards

Intel would announce their upcoming Devil’s Canyon processors at Computex 2014 which begins next week. Shipping in Q3 2014, the new Devil’s Canyon processors would include two new SKUs, the Core i7-4970K and Intel’s Core i5-4690K. The new processors would feature the 22nm Haswell microarchitecture and include enhanced packaging materials and design for better overclocking support.

Motherboard Makers May Allow Intel’s Devil’s Canyon CPU Support on Z87 Motherboards

Earlier this month, Intel launched their latest 9-Series chipset platform which includes a large army of Z97 and H97 chipset based motherboards from various motherboard makers. Along with the motherboard launch, we also saw the new Haswell refresh processors which are not to be mistaken with the upcoming Devil’s Canyon processors. Now prior to launch, we saw several official slides from Intel which detailed that Devil’s Canyon in particular would only feature compatibility with Z97 motherboards (targeted compatibility with Z97 boards). Even being architecturally similar, the Z87 chipset based motherboards would be unable to support the Core i7-4790K or its sibling, the Core i5-4690K.

Now a report from hardware.fr suggests that motherboard makers may try to remove this restriction enforced by Intel to allow compatibility of Devil’s Canyon processors on Z87 motherboards too. A motherboard maker has informed hardware.fr that they are already running internal validation tests on 8-Series boards to add support of Devil’s Canyon processors through an upcoming BIOS when the processors are available. This will in return call in excess of sales of a handful of Z87 parts whose sales have been disrupted by the arrival of the new Z97 boards. Do keep in mind that we have seen some impressive designs on the Z87 generation of motherboards hence overclock support on the year old boards would be as great as the current 9-Series products.

This will also add more longevity and support for Z87 motherboards until Broadwell arrives early next year. There are a lot of consumers who are currently using the Z87 chipset based motherboards and would get frustrated to switch to another board when upgrading to a Devil’s Canyon processors. This would end if the BIOS ships in time, eliminating the need to switch or upgrade to a new motherboard based on the 9-Series chipset.

However, as much good as this sounds we should all be aware that this is currently a rumor and nothing official has been said. Motherboard manufacturer’s did try to do something similar last year when they tried to enable OC support for Haswell on Non-Z motherboards. Termed as Non-Z OC support by ASRock, several motherboard makers which include ASUS, Gigabyte and Biostar hopped abroad this bandwagon and started offering BIOS which ended the restriction allowing users to easily overclock on their H87 chipset based motherboards. But Intel soon retaliated and started actively blocking Haswell Non-Z OC For K-Series Processors on H87/B75 Motherboards asking vendors to release a second BIOS few weeks later to end this support. So we shouldn’t just yet keep our hopes high and wait for the official announcement next week on June 2nd-3rd at Intel’s Computex 2014 seminar. Specifications for the upcoming Devil’s Canyon processors can be found below:

Intel Core i7-4790K, Core i5-4690K, Pentium G3258 Specifications Chart: