300-Series Chipset Motherboards Might Not Support Kaby Lake

Kaby Lake won’t work on 300-Series.

We all pretty much knew this, or strongly suspected it. Now, more and more reports are coming in confirming that Intel won’t implement backward-compatibility for “Skylake” and “Kaby Lake” chips. Not at first, anyway. The upcoming Intel 300-series chipset and LGA1151 socket will severely limit the user’s ability to use older tech. We know that 100-series and 200-series motherboards offer support for both “Skylake” and “Kaby Lake” chips. Not being able to support 8th gen Coffee Lake is not that surprising. However, making the 300-series backward-compatible with these products would have been welcomed. The news comes courtesy of a Hardware.info report, so nothing is official just yet.

What about the socket?

The 300-Series uses the LGA 1151 socket, which means it might support older LGA1151 processors in the future. This is where BIOS updates come in, and they should prove useful for those who don’t want to buy a new processor just yet. By forcing its customers to change their motherboards every two generations, Intel is making a lot of people angry. Sure, nobody expects to keep their current motherboard forever. However, when the socket remains unchanged, backward compatibility should be a given. Then there’s Coffee Lake’s performance. If the new generation is not significantly more powerful when compared to to the old one, upgrading is not even worth the trouble.

What do you think about Intel’s strategy?

More importantly, will you upgrade to the new 300-Series motherboards knowing the potential limitations?