Windows 11 22H2 "runs like magic" on 12-year-old unsupported Intel CPU, says elated user

Earlier today, we reported about performance issues that AMD's recently released Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 desktop CPUs are having on Windows 11 22H2 during gaming. Funnily, the Ryzen 9 7950X, which is the flagship 7000 series SKU, is found to be losing performance when SMT and both its CCDs are enabled. While it is possible that drivers are causing the problem, the new Windows feature update is certainly a suspect regardless.

The AMD Ryzen 7000 series is on the Windows 11 22H2 supported CPUs list (the system requirements are the same as on Windows 11 21H2) and these kinds of performance bugs, though not unexpected, are certainly undesirable on a supported CPU. Ironically, however, a 12-year-old Intel CPU, that's not officially supported by Windows 11, has been found to be running the new feature update like a dream.

A Reddit user with the username "paul_is_on_reddit" found out their Core i5-580M, a two core four thread CPU from 2010, is working fine on the 2022 update. The user even claims that Windows 11 22H2 "runs like magic" on it. Rufus 3.20 was used to bypass the system requirements, like TPM among others, for Windows 11, a feature that was introduced with the previous 3.18 update.

They write:

Using Rufus 3.20, I was easily able to install Windows 11 on this Acer laptop (which was made in 2010). Notice the CPU is a first-gen intel i5-580m (3Mb L2, 2-cores, 4 threads, hyperthreading, 2.67Ghz-3.2Ghz). I used Rufus to remove all the TPM/RAM/CPU requirements. W11 runs like magic on it.

What this suggests is that older hardware, which have been shunned by Microsoft mainly due to security-related reasons, are nearly perfectly capable of running Windows 11. Ironically, however, the company itself recommended disabling some of the security features to gain more gaming performance, as some of them have always been known to cause performance degradations even on supported CPUs.

Interestingly, back in June, Microsoft had actually begun offering the 22H2 upgrade to users on unsupported systems. Though the company was quick to pull it, citing it as a bug.

Source: paul_is_on_reddit (Reddit)