ASRock X79 Extreme4 - Looking for Xeon support and Boot From PCIe support

[Goat]

Hello there.

My friend has an old ASRock X79 Extreme4 motherboard and is looking to upgrade to a new CPU. I found an older Xeon E5-2xxx v2 series Xeon that would work without an update, but I also found a much much better E7-8xxx v2 Xeon that might require a modification to work.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/X79%20Ex...x.asp#BIOS

There's the website, and 3.70 is the most recent BIOS released.

I also wouldn't be surprised if the better CPU would just work without a mod, but I figure you guys would know the answer better than I would. I don't know much about BIOS modding, but acquiring both Xeon CPU support and boot from PCIe NVMe support would be great.

Thanks!

[DeathBringer]

Post a screenshot of third (Mainboard) tab of CPU-Z.
Find any motherboard based in X79 chipset with support of Xeon E7-8800 v2 series.

[Goat]

Post a screenshot of third (Mainboard) tab of CPU-Z.
Find any motherboard based in X79 chipset with support of Xeon E7-8800 v2 series.

No such motherboard with an E7-8800 compatible X79 chipset exists, so I guess I'm out of luck here.
I also doubt I will find one with PCIe boot.

So I'll let this thread remain as warning to all others who might be pondering this: LGA2011 with an X79 chipset does not support E7-8xxx Xeons.

They require a very rare and specialized chipset, which will likely not be found on your consumer level motherboard.

If anyone has any updates on this situation in the future, feel free to post.

[DeathBringer]

NVMe support is offtopic in this section.