Modder Gets Bartlett Lake 273PQE Working on Consumer Z790 Board

In a great example of hardware lockouts proving more of a challenge to enthusiasts than a real stopper, a modder has managed to get Intel's enterprise-only CPU, the Bartlett Lake Core 9 S273PQE, working on a consumer Z790 motherboard, letting us see what this unique 12 P-core CPU can do.

Intel never officially released Bartlett Lake CPUs to consumers; instead, it targeted enterprise and edge systems. Ditching the dual-architecture designs of its most recent CPUs, these chips were unique in that they were Performance Core only. And 12 of them are in this particular chip, giving it the highest P-core count of any Intel CPU ever made. Everything else is packed to the gills with efficiency and LPE cores.

That's what makes this such a fun project, and why community member Kryptonfly went to the effort of getting it working. They used an ASUS Z790-AYW OC WIFI motherboard with some basic Bartlett Lake support, and after modifying the BIOS firmware with Claude to add support for this particular chip, it booted fine, and it shows up in the BIOS correctly, too.

The downside? It doesn't go any further than that. There's an issue with a USB device, so that's put the brakes on this project for now while Kryptonfly works it out. Still, if they can update the BIOS to get past previous blockages, it seems likely they'll be able to eclipse this one. We may not have long to wait to see how this chip performs in Windows benchmarks.

Real-world performance is unlikely to be as impressive as Intel's top chips, especially its newly revamped Arrow Lake Plus designs, but with 12 cores and support for hyperthreading—a rarity in modern Intel chips—the 273PQE is no slouch. It also reaches 5.9GHz on single-core boost, or up to 5.3GHz across all the cores, and has 36MB of cache. It should be a decent little productivity and gaming workhorse.

If they can get it working, that is.