Long overdue post!
So, equiped with everything, I booted into the command line interface and launched in DOS the new modded 0.80 EFIFlash too, entered the flashing command line and voila, the force flash process started. This had to be the most stressful part of the whole thing.
But, worth it, because I got that sought after "Success" message. At that point it was time to remove my flashing chip, the Celeron G3930 to make place for the beast i7 8700K. I was sort of stressed at this point because I didn't know if things really worked as there's no cookie cutter way to do this and no results page to show others results, but without a boot drive, I knew exactly that I'd go directly to BIOS is things worked as they should.
The All-in-one program created by a user at Win-Raid does quite a few steps to mod the BIOS, there's a mod to change the maximum amount of thread from 8 to 16, a mod to add the microcodes for a select amount of processors, there's three total for three different batch of processors, there's also one to fix hyper threading, one to fix PCIE Express lane distribution to the slots and a few other coffee lake specific issues for running on 6th and 7th gen motherboards.
So, back to the first booting, well, here was the results!
I see Z170X and 8700K on the same page, YES! SUCCESS!
At this point I was so happy everything was working, ram slots were working, so I wanted to start pushing this sytem. See what this 8700K was capable of! I put everything in the case PSU, Mobo+trimmings, GPU, two m.2 NVME SSDs with the watercooling.
Started the watercooling planning, it was quite straight forward because my part layout and parts I had on hand. which included like 15 inches of EK ZMT tubing, chromed alphacool tubing and some 16mm PETG. I loved working with chromed tubing last time, so I decided to use as much as I could again, so three of the five tubing runs had chrome and the two last ones had ZMT, turned out quite well if I say so myself.
Now, with everything up and running it was time to push this little CPU!
I had to play with the lighting because I just couldn't do the RGB thing, so I decided on a theme that fit the motherboard colors.
I pushed and pushed and pushed, climbed up to 5.3 GHz, just couldn't get it stable under CB R20 at a voltage that could keep temperatures under throttling limits with this monoblock and radiator solution. I although settled on 4*8GB of B-Die 3200/16 RAM with an overclock of 5.2 GHz.
https://valid.x86.fr/ze5ur8 et voilà!
Now that my CPU overclock is dialed down, it'll be the time to overclock RAM, which I'm hoping to achieve at least over what this motherboard is rated for, so above 3866 MHz.
Now, stay tuned until the next post!