The modder working to get Intel’s unique 12 P-core Bartlett Lake 273PQE CPU running on a consumer motherboard has hit a new milestone: It now boots to Windows! They were even able to get some basic system info apps running. No benchmark results yet, but after some more tweaking, I doubt they’ll be far off.
Just a few days ago, we heard of a modder who had managed to tweak the BIOS firmware on an Asus Z790 consumer motherboard to post with a Bartlett Lake CPU installed. This isn’t the platform that chip was originally designed for, having been built for Edge and Embedded systems. But the hack worked, and it posted—but it stumbled on a USB error. Now, though, the modder has blown through that threshold and gotten the system working on Windows.
“HISTORICAL!” the modder, who goes by Kryptonfly, posted on the Overclock.net forums Thursday. “We fixed the SA init by fooling the FSP-M with the Raptor lake SA/PEG init, the Raptor lake SA initializes after our Bartlett lake patches for the mem init side, no more 5F hanging and I CAN BOOT INTO WINDOWS!”
They were able to get Aida64 to run and spit out system information, including listing the CPU correctly, highlighting its 24 “cores.” Really, they’re virtual threads, with the 12-core CPU supporting hyperthreading.
Kryptonfly previously posted a video (above) of their efforts getting the system to post.
The 273PQE is a powerful CPU, albeit one that lacks the multithreading capabilities of Intel’s split-architecture chips. As powerful as 12 P cores might be, they won’t stand up to an eight-P-core system with an additional 16+ E cores backing them up.
We won’t know what this chip can really do until the modder gets some benchmarks working. But given their recent success, we doubt it’ll be long before they manage it.
It’s a fun experiment, and it could open a new avenue for LGA1700 owners in the future who want to run these more modern CPUs on older motherboards, similar to how it’s possible to get 9th-generation laptop CPUs running on LGA1151 motherboards with some microcode adjustments.
