@Militar5030 Hi and welcome to Win-Raid forums.
It should be possible to run a Skylake Xeon on the Gigabyte Z170 HD3 DDR3 but you must use BIOS F20 or later.
As the Skylake Xeon microcode is already in the BIOS (CPUID 506E3) you don’t need to add it.
- Download and extract CoffeeTime v0.99 and drag and drop the BIOS file onto it (or open CoffeeTime and select the BIOS manually and click continue).
- Click on the two dots in the ME section and select ‘11.8.77.3664 Corp Cut’ from the drop down list at the bottom then click on ‘Replace’
- In the ME section click on the arrows to change ME to ‘Disabled’
- In the Fixes section for ‘ME Recovery’ click on ‘Remove’ so it turns green (this is usually required on Asus boards but I would do it just to be safe)
- Click on ‘Save image’ at the bottom and give the file a new name (note that it will have the extension .bin)
- If you want to use Q-flash to flash the BIOS you must edit one byte using a hex editor so that it will accept the modified file.
Otherwise use a modified version of Efiflash from a bootable USB drive.
WARNING & DISCLAIMER: There is a risk when you flash any BIOS that the system may become bricked and this risk only increases when you modify the BIOS. I am not responsible should you brick the board - you must decide if the risk is worth it. I highly recommend obtaining a hardware programmer to recover from a bad flash.
WARNING #2: Please note that this motherboard has ‘DualBIOS’. If the board fails to boot after flashing a modified BIOS it may attempt to boot from the backup BIOS automatically without any warning message! If you then flash a bad BIOS over the backup chip you will brick the board!