MSI Betrays AMD's Socket AM4 Longevity Promise: No Zen2 for 300-series?

Putting a newer processor on an older motherboard with just a "BIOS update" can still be a big hassle, if you aren't specifically doing an upgrade.

If you already have the motherboard and just simply want to replace the older processor with a newer one, then you are ok.

But if you are shopping for a new build and find a great price on a "older" motherboard, you're going to be in a rough situation getting that new processor to actually work.

I recently tried to do this and ended up returning the processor and getting the previous generation Ryzen 5 that luckily Microcenter had just so happen to put on sale at a great price. Otherwise, my only recourse was to mail the motherboard to the manufacture and have them flash the BIOS.

It's nice that the option is available, but it can still be a big hassle for many scenarios...enough that I think many people will just opt for buying a newer motherboard with all the advantages that comes with.
 
Sucks. My plan was to try Zen 2 in my Gigabyte x370 just to see how well it worked. Then get an x570 board anyway.
 
Putting a newer processor on an older motherboard with just a "BIOS update" can still be a big hassle, if you aren't specifically doing an upgrade.

If you already have the motherboard and just simply want to replace the older processor with a newer one, then you are ok.

But if you are shopping for a new build and find a great price on a "older" motherboard, you're going to be in a rough situation getting that new processor to actually work.

I recently tried to do this and ended up returning the processor and getting the previous generation Ryzen 5 that luckily Microcenter had just so happen to put on sale at a great price. Otherwise, my only recourse was to mail the motherboard to the manufacture and have them flash the BIOS.

It's nice that the option is available, but it can still be a big hassle for many scenarios...enough that I think many people will just opt for buying a newer motherboard with all the advantages that comes with.

This isn't always the case. You can often flash a BIOS without a CPU or RAM installed. I did that with my current X399 motherboard. I reviewed this board awhile back and threw a Threadripper 2920X on it. I no longer had a 19xx series CPU around. So I used the BIOS recovery procedure and flashed the BIOS with a newer ROM and I was good to go. While not every motherboard can do this, allot of the medium to higher end motherboards can. While doing an upgrade certainly guarantees you won't have to rely on that feature, its more common than you think and its being added to lower priced motherboards all the time.

That said, if the article is true, it could be for a number of reasons. Two come to mind immediately. The first is that MSI's VRM implementation may not be up to meeting the requirements for the newer Ryzen CPUs. This doesn't mean the implementation is bad, but it could mean that its simply not flexible enough to do what's required for those CPU's. The second is that MSI may simply choose not to spend the time, money and resources to do these updates on older motherboards for more business oriented reasons. They may simply have concluded that the vast majority of users of those existing motherboards will not be upgrading to the newer CPUs and that anyone looking to buy those CPUs will simply opt to buy the newer motherboards, which is generally the case as those older boards may no longer be available in the retail channel.

What people don't understand about socket longevity is that support for additional CPU microcode in the UEFI BIOS is required and continually adding CPU support without breaking something else becomes more difficult the more times you do it. Case in point, the 990FX motherboards were almost identical to the 890FX boards chipset wise, but the VRM implementations were altered to support Bulldozer while still being backwards compatible with Phenom. However, when the boards launched ahead of the CPU's, problems arose with those older CPUs due to BIOS issues. When Bulldozer actually dropped, things were a mess there as those boards really didn't have the validation and QVL work with those final retail CPUs they needed to. It took a long time for those boards to get up to speed with either processor family.

Intel in contrast doesn't even get into that trap as they tend to support two generations of CPU at most before a mandatory socket change. Obviously, that has its own downsides but motherboard manufacturers and Intel avoid the above scenario by limiting processors to specific chipsets and sockets.
 
You people honestly believe MB manufacturers were going to keep supporting newer CPUs on old boards. I said before they would only support 2 gens maybe 3 from the big players. Honestly there should be a significant difference going from 370 to 570 boards.
 
You people honestly believe MB manufacturers were going to keep supporting newer CPUs on old boards. I said before they would only support 2 gens maybe 3 from the big players. Honestly there should be a significant difference going from 370 to 570 boards.

I think the expectation is based on how AMD motherboards have been handled historically. Back in the Bulldozer and earlier days, processor compatibility was often extended as far as it could be from the most popular motherboard manufacturers. Not every manufacturer did that, but some did. This was often problematic as it led to problems with newer and older CPU's alike as I outlined above. It makes sense to limit this so that companies aren't spending a ton of time on motherboards they don't produce anymore.
 
I'm guessing this piece of news is unlikely, unless they want to kill off the entire A320 range... Not the first time regional offices have gotten the wrong ideas...

Either which way, it's been a while since I've upgraded a CPU and kept my main board... Last time I did that was getting an E2160 and an X38 board while waiting for the G0 Q6600...
 
Good thing I did not buy MSI then. I just hope other manufacturers do not follow this example.
 
You people honestly believe MB manufacturers were going to keep supporting newer CPUs on old boards. I said before they would only support 2 gens maybe 3 from the big players. Honestly there should be a significant difference going from 370 to 570 boards.

my asrock x370 has zen 2 support, so yeah we were.. but given how bad msi's drivers have been i'm honestly not surprised they did this.

that being said though i'll most likely be replacing the board anyways.
 
Either which way, it's been a while since I've upgraded a CPU and kept my main board... Last time I did that was getting an E2160 and an X38 board while waiting for the G0 Q6600...

If the article is true, I think this is the precise reason why MSI isn't going to bother updating motherboards that are almost two years old to support the next generation of Ryzen CPU's. People do not usually upgrade their CPU on a single motherboard more than once. Meaning, they have an initial CPU with the build and then a single upgrade during the service life of that configuration. I know there are exceptions to this rule. Hell I've been an exception myself on occasion. There are also plenty of people who buy a new motherboard with every CPU to get the latest VRMs which are optimized for the newer CPUs and the latest features which may be included on the newer motherboards that weren't on the previous generation.
 
so what will x570 do that x370 won't, again? PCI-E 4.0 and a few other tricks? I guess if people want to pay to beta test AMD's new in-house chipset and all the woes that will undoubtedly come with it that's great, but I'll keep my Asus x370 so long as the 7nm CPU's work on it.
 
I can appreciate it if MSI said they were not going to do this to begin with. But to switch this on people now is pretty messed up right? Luckily I didn't buy MSI when I switched over to Ryzen a couple of months ago, and went with a X470 board instead of a X370 or B350 board.
 
so what will x570 do that x370 won't, again? PCI-E 4.0 and a few other tricks? I guess if people want to pay to beta test AMD's new in-house chipset and all the woes that will undoubtedly come with it that's great, but I'll keep my Asus x370 so long as the 7nm CPU's work on it.

It may not be that bad a CPU / chipset launch. I've had beta hardware in hand as well as engineering samples of these things before retail drivers were available. Over the last 14 years I've only seen a handful of chipset / motherboard platform launches that were really problematic. AMD's first AM4 chipsets were abysmal but there were issues on the motherboard manufacturing side that had nothing to do with AMD. There was a convergence of circumstances there which hadn't ever happened before or since. Those issues largely boiled down to firmware, which were all addressed over time. X470 and B450 were excellent, and even X399 wasn't that bad at launch. Most of Intel's launches have been pretty good even when they've made significant platform changes.

I've often argued against utilizing newer CPU's on older motherboards. At one time this was a detriment to performance where you wouldn't get the most out of your CPU due to bus limitations or whatever else. These days, your largely missing out on features and some overclocking capability on the bleeding edge of things at best. If you want to go tinfoil hat about it, you could make a circumstantial case for motherboard manufacturers baking in obsolescence into their strategy forcing an upgrade of the motherboard every generation or two rather than being able to keep the same board for five or more years. While that might be part of the thinking, I believe its more about not wanting to spend money on updating motherboards that aren't made anymore.

I can appreciate it if MSI said they were not going to do this to begin with. But to switch this on people now is pretty messed up right? Luckily I didn't buy MSI when I switched over to Ryzen a couple of months ago, and went with a X470 board instead of a X370 or B350 board.

I don't recall any motherboard manufacturer explicitly stating that they would always support BIOS updates for every AMD CPU so long as they were electrically compatible. I don't believe that was ever stated even back in the Bulldozer and Phenom days. It was expected, but that doesn't make it reality.
 
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so what will x570 do that x370 won't, again? PCI-E 4.0 and a few other tricks? I guess if people want to pay to beta test AMD's new in-house chipset and all the woes that will undoubtedly come with it that's great, but I'll keep my Asus x370 so long as the 7nm CPU's work on it.
More like the x370 was the beta test and had a whole bunch of problems on release. The x570 should be a lot more solid. Like Dan said how many people actually upgrade a CPU with out a MB also? In 20 years of building computers I have never reused a MB.
 
More like the x370 was the beta test and had a whole bunch of problems on release. The x570 should be a lot more solid. Like Dan said how many people actually upgrade a CPU with out a MB also? In 20 years of building computers I have never reused a MB.
X58 and x79 when the xeons came down in price was a good instance of keeping a board but upgrading cpu 1-2 times.
 
More like the x370 was the beta test and had a whole bunch of problems on release. The x570 should be a lot more solid. Like Dan said how many people actually upgrade a CPU with out a MB also? In 20 years of building computers I have never reused a MB.

If that's the case then maybe I'll upgrade to x570 - would be nice to get a new board with new features... or I'll maybe jump to threadripper at that point.
 
It is a different time tho. It cost money to keep support boards that they

What people fail to understand is why things were done that way in that era. At the time, AMD's CPU business was floundering and wouldn't spend the money on developing a newer platform for its CPU's. So it kept refreshing the existing chipset and board design periodically with as little effort as was needed. Motherboard manufacturers sold very few AM3 / AM3+ boards in comparison to their Intel socket boards and as a result, they produced those parts longer than they ordinarily would. There are also some business / contract reasons why this was the case as well. For example, in order to use the AMD CPU logo or get chips from AMD you'd have to do specific things in order to keep getting product. Its not as heavy handled or far reaching as Intel / Motherboard manufacturer agreements and I don't know the specifics, but its likely that that extra longevity was required in those days and it wasn't entirely a motherboard manufacturers choice to keep updating BIOS versions for newer CPUs.

More like the x370 was the beta test and had a whole bunch of problems on release. The x570 should be a lot more solid.

That wasn't the case at all. There were allot of things going on the general public may not be aware of. First off, motherboard R&D groups and QVL teams aren't as large as you would imagine. Its important to understand this as it comes into play with what was going on during that time frame. Intel was launching its Z270 chipset ahead of schedule. This was done on purpose to beat AMD's launch of Ryzen and X370. This forced motherboard manufacturers to refocus on Intel and they got to spend less time on their respective X370 products. Its also a dick move on Intel's part because that was part of the plan. Also, AMD hadn't launched an entirely new enthusiast chipset in years. Their UEFI / AGESA code work was still being worked on up until a week or two ahead of launch. Once these boards made it into the hands of reviewers and then customers, the rushed nature of the release became more apparent. The hardware itself was solid, but memory compatibility and various quirks from AGESA code and immature UEFI BIOS revisions made things pretty rough on those early Ryzen customers.

AGESA was new as was the AMD reference BIOS. No one had experience working with it including AMD. AMD learned allot very quickly. X399 was a much better launch, but even it was incomplete. It lacked NVMe RAID capability out of the gate which was added later. There were also more memory issues with X399 than we'd see with later chipsets, but nothing as bad as X370. X470 and the X399 refresh boards were very smooth launches with very few issues. So AMD's learned allot and I don't think X570 will be all that bad out of the gate. It could be if enough changes are made, but as I said, AMD's showed a lot more skill in these things than it did with X370's launch.

Like Dan said how many people actually upgrade a CPU with out a MB also? In 20 years of building computers I have never reused a MB.

Like I said, I don't think it happens often. I did it with my ASUS P4C800 Deluxe as the P4C800-E Deluxe only had a better network controller and wasn't worth the price of an upgrade. So that motherboard probably ran the widest range of CPU's of any motherboard I've owned. I believe I used a Pentium 4 2.4A, 3.06B, and a 3.0C on it. I may have even used a Pentium 4 3.0E on it. I don't recall anymore. I know I had one, but it was short lived as I transitioned to the LGA 775 socket early on due to the Intel Retail Edge program. Many of my motherboards over the years have had two CPU's. I had an EVGA X58 Classified which ran a Core i7 920 C0 and a G0 stepping CPU. I had replaced that board with an ASUS Rampage III Black Edition, with a Core i7 980X. I think I ran the G0 chip on that board briefly, or I may have even used the 980X on the EVGA X58, but I don't recall. That board was very problematic for me and I got rid of it as soon as I could. I may have had an interim Rampage III Extreme prior to that. I think I did. So my 980X would have lived on two motherboards. That's happened to me, but then again I got free motherboards a lot of times.

I had some 440BX chipset based board that had two Celeron 300A's on it, a Pentium II 333MHz, Pentium II 266MHz, and a Pentium II 450. That might have been my ABIT BX6 Rev II. So occasionally I've done a ton of upgrades on an existing motherboard but this was back in the day where I had less disposable income and often bought lesser CPUs and overclocked them. These days I often buy a higher end CPU and run that for some time as subsequent CPUs over the last several years haven't been much of an upgrade. I had my Core i7 3930K for quite some time and my 5960X for five years. I also ran my dual QX9770's for several years. I had a Q6600 for some time as well. In my case, I sometimes upgraded the motherboards more often than CPU's. I rarely upgraded to refresh CPUs unless they brought something substantial to the table. So sometimes I'd use the same CPU across two different motherboard generations. My Core i7 5960X has lived on four motherboards motherboards. Two Rampage V Formula's, (one died) one Rampage V Extreme and a Rampage V Edition 10.

Obviously, MSI and other companies don't expect my scenario to be typical. I tend to think most people use a motherboard for a generation or two and use two CPU's max on a given board and then replace the motherboard with their next CPU. I'm curious to see what other HardOCP forum readers do, but keep in mind we aren't the norm either. So some of you guys might use more CPUs or less of them than the average enthusiast might.
 
More like the x370 was the beta test and had a whole bunch of problems on release. The x570 should be a lot more solid.
This reminds me a lot of the original ATI/AMD chipsets the RX480 and RX580 (Express 3200) back in 2004-2006.
 
I originally bought my X370 for my 1700X, and when I upgraded to the 2700X, I also bought a X470 mobo to go with it. I had planned on migrating the 2700X to the X370 for the wife, and get another motherboard for the 1700X to put in use for the kids machine. As long as I can use the 3xxx chips in my Asus X470, I'll be a happy camper..
 
In my particular case, I traditionally have a regular trickle-down upgrade cycle. Every year, a major component gets swapped out, and the old component goes to my wife, and HER old component goes to the kids, and THEIR old component goes to the Media Center - and then older parts are given away to relatives. I have been pretty standardized on AMD processors since the K6 era, and AMD has empowered me to do this. It's pretty rare to make a complete break in the cycle, but that happened with the Ryzen launch when I got the Asus Prime B350-Plus and the R7 1700 (at 3.8GHz all-core and using Corsair memory @ 2933 FROM LAUNCH until recent BIOS upgrades allowed it to run at the full 3000). The next year, instead of upgrading myself, I got my wife another B350-Plus and an R5-1600X.

In the process of doing maintenance on my computer, I ended up borking my personal B350-Plus (bad BIOS flash) and ended up getting a Crosshair VI Hero (I immediately flashed it to the latest BIOS at the time and have had no problems with this board, but YMMV) on this forum for $120 used while waiting for the RMA on the 350-Plus to complete. When the prices dropped sharply on first gen Ryzen parts after the the introduction of the 2700X I ended up selling my wife's 1600X, using the money from that (plus some) to get myself a 2700X CPU and gave her the 1700. My main attraction to the 2700X was the PBO. and even now, I don't bother to manually overclock that chip (as Kyle said, "What's the point?"). I got a good forum deal on another 2700X a couple of months ago and upgraded my wife with that (on her B350-Plus). Now the kids have the 1700 on the spare B350-Plus I got back from RMA and their old Core i5 6600K is in the Media Center PC.

Even though the last 2 years of upgrades have been... tumultuous... the Socket AM4 compatibility flexibility has been a huge boon to me. I plan to get a 3000 series Ryzen no later than next year and trickle everything down again. My Crosshair VI Hero is ready. Heck, even the B350-Plus now has the necessary BIOS to run those... I've honestly not seen a pressing need for a newer mainboard, and with the way AMD has been pricing their CPU's lately, I feel enthusiasts in general may very well be more inclined to same-board CPU upgrades than they traditionally have been.
 
so what will x570 do that x370 won't, again? PCI-E 4.0 and a few other tricks? I guess if people want to pay to beta test AMD's new in-house chipset and all the woes that will undoubtedly come with it that's great, but I'll keep my Asus x370 so long as the 7nm CPU's work on it.
570 is supposed to use a similar chipset to epyc, iirc, whereas 550 and lower have asmedia or somesuch based chipsets.
 
We saw this in the past with Phenom era processors. The cheaper version of my old AM2 motherboard got support for the 6 core CPUs but my more expensive, full size version got support for the AMD 965 and was never updated to support anything later. That was an ASUS board. I assumed we get three generations out of it though.

Currently I am on an ASRock X370 Killer SLI/AC which appears to be a popular board. I assume popular models and higher end ones will receive updates for a longer time. Those who cheap out will likely get left behind. Partially expected because the manufactures sales would dry up if few people bought new boards.
 
If I upgrade to 3rd Gen ryzen I'll likely get a new mobo.

I have had systems get upgraded in the past as well. It all depends.

The newer better auto clocking only works well on a newer board and at the moment I could afford it.

Really interested to see how the new ryzen system perform across all generations of boards.
 
I got an MSI Tomahawk B350 when Ryzen was pretty new, so I expected some "growing pains". What I stepped into, however, was the biggest pile of shit bios I've encountered in a very long time. I've got it working pretty smoothly now, but the journey was a nightmare. So many boots to a black screen of nothingness, rebooting and trying to navigate a bios menu that's not visible. Swapping video cards, monitors and cables just trying to get a display... to get anything to show. Finally getting a display as if by magic one boot, only for it to be gone the next.

And I won't even get into the issues with memory. Or with M.2 NVMe

So, this does not surprise me at all. Not that I would attempt to install a 3rd gen Ryzen in my Tomahawk. Hell, I won't even try swapping to a second gen. The next upgrade my MSI is getting will be some lead shot piercing the PCB. In the meantime I pray that nothing fails so I don't have to worry about swapping anything and fighting to get it to boot, and I leave it running 24/7 because I just never know when it will decide to turn on and not give me a display. Last. MSI. Ever.
 
I got an MSI Tomahawk B350 when Ryzen was pretty new, so I expected some "growing pains". What I stepped into, however, was the biggest pile of shit bios I've encountered in a very long time. I've got it working pretty smoothly now, but the journey was a nightmare. So many boots to a black screen of nothingness, rebooting and trying to navigate a bios menu that's not visible. Swapping video cards, monitors and cables just trying to get a display... to get anything to show. Finally getting a display as if by magic one boot, only for it to be gone the next.

And I won't even get into the issues with memory. Or with M.2 NVMe

So, this does not surprise me at all. Not that I would attempt to install a 3rd gen Ryzen in my Tomahawk. Hell, I won't even try swapping to a second gen. The next upgrade my MSI is getting will be some lead shot piercing the PCB. In the meantime I pray that nothing fails so I don't have to worry about swapping anything and fighting to get it to boot, and I leave it running 24/7 because I just never know when it will decide to turn on and not give me a display. Last. MSI. Ever.
I had a similar (though less extreme) experience with my gigabyte x370 board – bios was (and still is) pretty shaky, and limited board features didn't help. Will probably put it into storage and get an x570/3xxx combo when they come out, then maybe get a cheap 4c zen+ chip and sell/give away the gb board with that. Was considering MSI, but of course I'll probably change my mind by the time June rolls around.
 
I had a similar (though less extreme) experience with my gigabyte x370 board – bios was (and still is) pretty shaky, and limited board features didn't help. Will probably put it into storage and get an x570/3xxx combo when they come out, then maybe get a cheap 4c zen+ chip and sell/give away the gb board with that. Was considering MSI, but of course I'll probably change my mind by the time June rolls around.

The newer Ryzen boards are definitely better. A friend of mine just made the i5 2500k to Ryzen 2600 upgrade and he had absolutely none of the issues I ran into. Just one data point, but wow did it go smoothly.

I'm also seeing a lot fewer nightmare calls for help versus what it was like going on two years ago. I read the forum here, reddit and a few others. I see lots of successful Ryzen builds and very few with issues these days.

That said, I still suggest going with something other than an MSI. Asus does a good job. I'm personally leaning toward an ASRock for my next upgrade, but that's partly to get the fatal1ty sound system. I'm a recent convert to the school of better quality sound components producing audibly better sound.

On that note, that's another issue with my Tomahawk. The onboard sound is completely dead. I'm currently using a USB audio device so I can hear my games. The experience has been so bad that I don't even think about that issue most the time.
 
I'm hoping this is just fud. Many, many people have been sold on the long lifespan of the AM4 socket. I had my father buy an MSI x470 board and he has been wanting to upgrade it when the new chips come out. MSI is going to make me look like a lying idiot now.

It is certainly not unusual for a home builder running AMD chips to upgrade the CPU in the same board. My Gigabyte AM2+ board went from an Athlon 64X2 to a Phenom II to a later released Thuban Phenom II X6. It ran perfectly fine as my daily driver until well into 2014, and in fact for desktop use those CPUs are still "ok". This was the selling point people frequently wrote about circa 2008 when I decided to buy the AM2+ setup instead of a dead end 775 socket and the brand new 1366 platform was WAY out of my reach then (still in college). That was the exact advice given to me on forums just like this, buy AM2+ and upgrade it later.
 
Well this is a good time to put MSI on the blacklist.

**scratch that :)
 
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I'm hoping this is just fud. Many, many people have been sold on the long lifespan of the AM4 socket. I had my father buy an MSI x470 board and he has been wanting to upgrade it when the new chips come out. MSI is going to make me look like a lying idiot now.

It is certainly not unusual for a home builder running AMD chips to upgrade the CPU in the same board. My Gigabyte AM2+ board went from an Athlon 64X2 to a Phenom II to a later released Thuban Phenom II X6. It ran perfectly fine as my daily driver until well into 2014, and in fact for desktop use those CPUs are still "ok". This was the selling point people frequently wrote about circa 2008 when I decided to buy the AM2+ setup instead of a dead end 775 socket and the brand new 1366 platform was WAY out of my reach then (still in college). That was the exact advice given to me on forums just like this, buy AM2+ and upgrade it later.

you'll be fine with the 400 series, this is just the MSI 300 series boards.

I had a similar (though less extreme) experience with my gigabyte x370 board – bios was (and still is) pretty shaky, and limited board features didn't help. Will probably put it into storage and get an x570/3xxx combo when they come out, then maybe get a cheap 4c zen+ chip and sell/give away the gb board with that. Was considering MSI, but of course I'll probably change my mind by the time June rolls around.

yeah on the initial release MSI and gigabyte were clearly way behind on prepping boards for ryzen compared to asus and asrock.. gigabyte at least "attempted" to fix most of the bios issues over the course of 6-8 months. i almost ended up going with a gigabyte board as well but me being the cheap POS i am i couldn't pass up on the much cheaper asrock taichi.. for once me being a penny pincher worked out, lol.
 
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I bet they saved money on the size of the bios when creating those early series of boards. Now they can't physically fit the new bios on the older motherboards to support the new Ryzen CPUs. Here is an article about Bristol Ridge not fitting on certain motherboards.

I believe AMD warned the mobo manufacturers last year about bios size, but I can't find it now. :(
 
Either which way, it's been a while since I've upgraded a CPU and kept my main board...
Me too, but not because I wanted to , but I had no choice but to buy a new MB for the new CPU. If new CPUs would fit in my current MB, I'd have zero incentive to buy a new one.
 
Despite what my signature says my Ryzen system now runs on a MSI B350 Tomahawk because on the ASRock board my system would BSOD within a weeks worth of time. Also the Tomahawk can clock up my memory to 2866 of the 3000 rating it has, while the ASRock was only stable at 2666 at best. Some reason the ASRock board doesn't have the ability to increase the SOC voltage though it does have a VID rating that doesn't work for jack.

Am I interested in upgrading from my Ryzen 7 1700? No... As great as AMD's new CPU's are I can't imagine spending $200-$300 on something that's slightly better than what I have now. Does MSI's decision deter me if I was? Yea cause not only do I need to pay for the CPU but now I need to pay for a new motherboard as well. Is the B450 a world of difference better than the B350? No not really, the only thing that matters are the VRMs and pretty much every sub $100 motherboard has awful VRM setups. There is like this one Asus B350 that has a 6 phase VRM that was $125 while my Tomahawk I bought was $60 and has 4 phase VRM. The ASRock boards I think all have 3 phases with the exception of the X370's. On my Tomahawk I put a copper VRM heatsink cause it gets really hot under load.

I pretty much black listed ASRock at this point cause I've had too much fuckery from them with previous motherboards. I don't even know why I bought their B350 since I've had nothing but trouble with their boards in the past and I'm not the only one with many people making videos that explains their B350 issues. I was very happy with the MSI board until I heard they basically said fuck you buy my newer shit. If I build another Ryzen system it won't be an MSI motherboard either. This just seems like planned obsolescence and breaks the whole AM4 compatibility that AMD has set out. People are going to hack their BIOS's to get those CPU's supported I'm sure of it, because I know they'll just disable it in their BIOS updates, if they update the BIOS's any more.

s-l300.jpg
 
Wow. I was actually going to use their mITX board in my last build, but Microcenter didn't offer it and the asrock was priced too low to pass up. Guess it was a blessing in disguise.

ahh, reading pays this is in relation to the 300 series.
MSI will have one of the premier X570 motherboards without a doubt. They are bringing their X399 Creation brand to X570. That is one the 2 best X399 birds out there with excellent VRM support. I plan on buying it when I buy the 12 core 3700X chip. I already have a 2700X with an MSI Gaming M7 AC board. It was a decent board with great features, but vrm support was decent but not outstanding. My everyday overclock is 4.2 GHz.. I plan on upgrading my Alphacool Eisbaer 360 to the new thicker radiator and stronger pump with the Eisbaer Extreme 280mm. I am also putting an EK water block on my Radeon VII.So I am saving up a much as possible the next 3 months and using all my Amazon Prime Rewards to make the expenditure less painful.
 
Wow, that article was editorialized badly. Also, look at the source. It's from an anonymous Reddit account that received that answer from a single customer support representative. As we should all know by now, customer support can never be used as a reliable source for information like this.


First comment in that thread:
upload_2019-4-16_9-53-12.png


So everybody put your pitchforks away.
 
You know, I think it is kind of funny that all of these Socket AM4 boards still actually support the latest gen Bulldozer (Excavator) APUs (Bristol Ridge). They're so cheap my cousin bought one to run a mining rig, and I HAVE used this chip to upgrade the BIOS on a couple of cheaper socket AM4 mainboards...
 
Wow, that article was editorialized badly. Also, look at the source. It's from an anonymous Reddit account that received that answer from a single customer support representative. As we should all know by now, customer support can never be used as a reliable source for information like this.


First comment in that thread:
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So everybody put your pitchforks away.

Yeah the problem is that people run away with the information. But it it is weird where a lot of vendors have released their "updated" bios these past weeks for Ryzen 3000 some still have not?
 
Yeah the problem is that people run away with the information. But it it is weird where a lot of vendors have released their "updated" bios these past weeks for Ryzen 3000 some still have not?
Gigabyte is "taking their time" so their bios will be better than others (paraphrase).
 
Yeah the problem is that people run away with the information. But it it is weird where a lot of vendors have released their "updated" bios these past weeks for Ryzen 3000 some still have not?
I don't think we should expect all manufacturers to be on the same timeline. The May release window for Zen 2 is still a rumor, as far as I know.
 
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