Why Coffee Lake cannot work on Z270

For a long time it has been known that Intel’s upcoming 8th generation Coffee Lake series of CPUs would be arriving on LGA 1151 motherboards, leaving many to wonder if Coffee Lake would be backwards compatible with Intel’s existing 100-series and 200-series motherboards. 

Over time it has been confirmed that Coffee Lake will not work on 100-series and 200-series motherboards, though Intel has never officially gone on the record to give a reason why, leading many to assume that “Intel is blocking backwards compatibility” or have even gone as far as to say that motherboard makers have forced Intel to do this to achieve greater Z370 motherboard sales.

Intel has now released their “8th Gen (S-platform) Intel Processor Family Datasheet“, which reveals a lot about the company’s new Coffee Lake series of CPUs. The data included in the 155 page long PDF has also revealed exactly why Intel’s existing LGA 1151 motherboards cannot support Coffee Lake.