asrock fatality h170 performance: bios and driver

soulstealer wrote: its good to see that there is an update to support kaby lake cpus already. i was wondering wether you would profit from the respective bios and driver updates, since the microcode and management engine were updated. does anyone know wether you get better performance from these updates apart from using a kaby lake cpu?

Good question, without an easy answer. I have never seen any information that indicated that performance was changed for the better or worse, after this type of update. There has been many of this kind of update by Intel over the years, so you would think any performance improvements would have been noticed by the users. I can't think of one case where that was known to happen.

In the past, certain updates like this could cause problems if the INF files and IME driver was not updated to the newer versions, when the previous generation processor was being used. The Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge processor UEFI/BIOS update for the Intel six series chipsets was (is) infamous for creating problems, if the update was not done correctly. Fortunately, the Haswell to Hawell Refresh, to Broadwell, and Skylake to Kaby Lake updates have not had the same problems.

These updates seem to be 100% compatibility based for the new processors, with nothing that applies to the previous generation processors, except for backwards compatibility.

I have never heard of a microcode update that occurred during the normal lifespan of an Intel processor, not associated with any update for a new processor generation, that resulted in better performance. Those updates normally contain bug fixes, which could be interpreted as improved performance, but are obviously never seen as such.

Consider this: given the increasingly small performance gains provided with the new processor generations, if Intel could enhance the performance of the previous generation processors as part of the update, would they be motivated to do so?

Or from a marketing perspective, if a microcode or IME update did provide a performance enhancement, wouldn't that fact be announced along with the updates?