Haswell Refresh support for X6630G

I ordered an i7-4790K on ebay for my X6630G, but realized that it may not be supported with the current bios since my X6630G shipped with a 4570. Acer's website has a few types of bios for the X6630G: P21, P22, P11 and P12. The P22.A3 states that it supports new CPUs, but my current bios is P21.A3 that at least one other user has mentioned doesn't seem to support Haswell refresh CPUs (https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/630778/upgrade-cpu-x6630g)

Am I stuck? Is the P21.A3 bios the last bios released for this version of the X6630G, or is there some poorly documented way to flash the P22.A3 bios over the P21.A3 bios?

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billsey

The 4790K should work, but you might have to revamp the cooling. The stock processors are lower wattage than the K models, but I think in the 4th gen it wasn't a huge difference. Note that the BIOS has no hooks for overclocking, so most of the advantage with a K processor isn't supported. If you have an i5-4570 now, then an i7-4790K is in the same group of Haswell chips, so the BIOS changes likely aren't needed.

Chairmain_Wow

billsey said:

The 4790K should work, but you might have to revamp the cooling. The stock processors are lower wattage than the K models, but I think in the 4th gen it wasn't a huge difference. Note that the BIOS has no hooks for overclocking, so most of the advantage with a K processor isn't supported. If you have an i5-4570 now, then an i7-4790K is in the same group of Haswell chips, so the BIOS changes likely aren't needed.

I'm not concerned about overclocking, but the 4570 was released in mid 2013 as one of the original Haswell chips, while the 4590K is a Haswell refresh chip released in mid 2014. The wikipedia page has this to say about the refresh chips:

"Haswell Refresh CPUs are supported by Intel's 9 Series chipsets (Z97 and H97), while motherboards with 8 Series chipsets usually require a BIOS update to support Haswell Refresh CPUs."

The X6630G uses a Q87 chipset and seems very likely to need a bios update. Some of the other versions of the bios available (for instance, the P22.A3 bios) explicitly call out support for new CPUs but the P21.A3 does not.

Chairmain_Wow

Well having tested it I can confirm that my the X6630G with P21.A3 bios does NOT support a 4790k. The PC will not post with the cpu in, presumably because a bios update is required for Haswell refresh CPUs. Unfortunately acer never updated this bios to support Haswell refresh chips.