Adventure: Running 8/9th gen Coffee Lake CPUs on Z170 motherboard (ASUS Maximus VIII Ranger)

[limited_imagination]

View attachment 282064
Here are the pin config details.
You won't need to connect pin 1, 2 and 9 for the operation. For the rest of the pins, you can find them all on the programmer.
For your board, the connector seems to be upside down so, the top right pin is pin 1 and the single pin on the other end is pin 9. It should go like this when viewed from your previous image.
9 7 5 3 1
. 8 6 4 2
Your idea seems amazing and to be honest, I was looking for something like that back in the day and that way, you can make a proper cable for use in the future as well.

Here is the link to the fixed ASProgrammer

AsProgrammer_V2.1.0.13_XiTongZhiJia.zip

drive.google.com

All the best.

Hello again @itsakjt . I never was able to flash my modified bios, but as the countdown to W10 support continues and I need to upgrade to W11, I am returning to this project again.

I just discovered that my Z270-A motherboard's bios header pins are completely different from the layout of the pins on my MT25QL128ABA bios chip.

And their order bears no relationship to the suggested layout above.

Knowing this problem now, I'm going to have another bash at this through the CH341 and molex connector on the header.

I tested for continuity on both the chip legs and the header pins with a multimeter, and on my Z270-A board at least, it's actually wired the way this photo shows.

I am amazed that I didn't fry the bios chip when I previously hooked up the CH341 as recommended above!

Moral of the story is to bust out your ohm meter before trying this with your header pins!

We shall see if I get any further in the project, with this new knowledge.

Please excuse the non-standard pinout numbering on the image attached, that was just done to show which chip legs match which pins on the header for this particular motherboard, after using an ohm meter.

Starting with from the image attached, I then used the ohm meter on the janky test clamp of my CH341 and traced its terminals to the pin numbers on its SOP8 card.

So I can translate the position of the header pins on the Z270-A motherboard to the corresponding SOP8 pin numbers in this way:

(blank) 3
5 2
6 1
4 3
3 (unused pin)

Where:
1=CS
2=MOIS
3=3.3v
4=GND
5=MOSI
6=CLK

So I may try to rig up connections to the header pins like @itsakjt did in the photo shown in post #176, so I can skip both the SOP8 card and test clamp altogether.

But if I could ever get the janky test clamp to work directly on the chip, then I believe the chip's legs would correspond to the following pin numbers on the CH341's SOP8 card:

1 3
2 3
3 6
4 5

So says my exploits with my ohm meter, anyway.

If this looks wrong to anyone, then I suspect it is because my test clamp wiring was wrong at the outset, so it's not leading back to the correct pins on the SOP8 card of the CH341.

Please holler out if I have the wrong translation between the terminals on the clamp and the terminals on the SOP8 board, as that would change everything.