i got a z170 pro gaming with an old i7 6700k. the board has a TPM header, but i probably won't buy one in the next time. still i wonder, in BIOS i can activate "TPM discrete" or "TPM firmware". the first option should be the installed TPM module, which i don't have. but what about the second option? ist that intel ME or something like that? will windows 11 work if i enable it? or is there no other way then to buy a TPM module? sadly the pc health check program doesn't start for me after installing it, so i can't just test it easily. also im kinda scared that something breaks on my current setup if i play with TPM, secure boot and csm options and so on
Enabling the TPM Firmware should let it pass the TPM 2.0 test. The 6700k is sixth generation, so it will fail the CPU Gen test.
Microsoft tried some TPM stuff in the past years and it was quite unpopular back then too. Same with Secure Boot and UEFI forcing for specific features. My 8700K system passes with Intel PTT enabled. I don't find it amusing that basically PCs that are powerful enough to play games at 4K and do most work related tasks, with slower rendering/video encoding, are barely passing the checks. The CPU generation thing is pretty stupid. I have other PCs other than my main Coffee Lake, and let's just say that my FX8350 PC with 8GB RAM is essentially similar on 90% of tasks with the 8700K. Excluding CPUs like the 7700K and 6700K or older Xeons with 6-8 cores seems pretty odd as a choice. I doubt that Windows 11 has important features that cannot work on a 7900X machine that costed a lot of money not long ago. Also I am seeing that Xtreme CPUs like 9980XE are not supported either, which kinda makes sense given the Skylake arch. Then again - X series CPU from 2018. Not supported for 2021 OS. Ouch.
My motherboard is a Gigabyte B250M-DS3H-CF. Not particularly high end, nor particularly new. The last BIOS update was in 2018. But it does have TPM, I just had to turn it on in the CMOS setup. And yes, the setting was called Platform Trust Technology. I'm still failing the check for Windows 11, but I think that's because I'm not using a Microsoft account to login to this computer. I know a little about the government and backdoors from my experiences more than 20 years ago, but non-disclosure prevents my saying anything. I will just say that you are very wise not to trust hardware encryption.
The hard floor requirement still indicate that at lease 1.2 however it does state in the soft floor 2.0.
If they want people to use win11 in the final version they will have to disable TPM because most computers don't have it. out of 6 computers i have only 2 has it.