Possible to run EPYC gen1 in gen2 boards?

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charliehorse55

New Member
Oct 3, 2019
16
2
3
Would it be possible to run naples chips in motherboards designed for rome? I know you wouldn't get the features, such as pcie 4.0, but they should be electrically compatible? Pins are the same so you'd just get PCIe 3.0 and 2666 mhz ram? Probably have to mod the bios to add the microcode support. Are there any hardware changes that prevent this?

It's tempting, because one could buy cheap gen1 chips now, then upgrade to gen2 when gen3 is released, and then even probably go to gen3 eventually! Get 3 different cpus in the same motherboard!
 

maes

Active Member
Nov 11, 2018
102
69
28
AFAIK Rome-designed motherboards make use of the 'extra' (#129) PCIe lane on the Rome chips, which the Naples chip completely lack. That would probably cause issues like leaving you without any kind of ipmi or integrated video amongst other things.