Intel Core 9 273PQE 'Bartlett Lake' CPU seen successfully booted into Windows on a Z790 motherboard

A new milestone was reached in the hardware modding community, as folks over on Overclock.net have successfully booted the Core 9 273PQE "Bartlett Lake" CPU to Windows. This is a monumental achievement for the modding community, as the CPU was never designed for consumer motherboards and is marketed exclusively by Intel for embedded applications and edge devices.

The latest update was part of a continuous modding effort by community member "kryptonfly," who has been trying to get the Core 9 273PQE to boot to Windows for a while now. On the overclock.net forum, the modder posted about a new milestone: he had rewritten the BIOS of a consumer Z790 motherboard to get the CPU to boot into Windows.

According to the modder, he used an ASUS Z790-AYW OC WiFi motherboard with a BIOS rewritten with AI assistance, and missing support components were then added. The board could then detect the Core 9 273PQE, but a successful boot sequence could not be achieved. Now, with a few additional steps to fool the boot sequence using a Raptor Lake spoof, the system can finally boot into Windows.

Of course, it is important to note that this is not yet a stable procedure that normal users can replicate. This is an experimental approach being undertaken by an enthusiast to learn more about the underlying architecture of Bartlett Lake, as well as the rationale for Intel not supporting the CPU on consumer Z-series motherboards.

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This raises the question of whether Intel could have released Bartlett Lake CPUs for the general public. Of course, gamers and content creators would love a modern Intel CPU with only P-cores, and the 12-core, 24-thread Core 9 273PQE would certainly have been a chart-topper in many applications.

Kryptonfly's project is not yet completed either. The CPU boots into Windows and shows up in software like CPU-Z and ASUS TurboV Core, but we still have no idea about the system's stability and performance. The modder did say that the GPU was being detected, which opens up the possibility of gaming benchmarks in the future.