AMD is working to bring full Ryzen 5000 support to 300 Series motherboards.

More than a year after the launch of the Ryzen 5000 processors, AMD announced that it is looking at options to allow the chips to be used with 300-series motherboards. “We know this would be a good thing for the community, and we’re trying to figure out how to make this happen,” said David McAfee, Corporate VP and General Manager, Client Channel Business at AMD.

Support for 300 series motherboards is something the community has been asking for for a long time…

This change in strategy comes after several manufacturers unexpectedly added support for Ryzen 5000 processors to A320 series motherboards last month, but were reportedly prevented from enabling this support on X370 and B350 motherboards. This provoked strong criticism from the community.

The company promised that the AM4 socket would last for five years, but motherboard limitations ended up restricting its ability to continue to support all Ryzen chips on all AM4 platforms. These limitations ultimately led to AMD’s original decision to limit its Ryzen 5000 processors to only new, more expensive 500-series motherboards, leading to a firestorm of criticism from its fans. This prompted the company to change the plan and have the 400 series of motherboards support these processors.

However, the company dropped support for 300-series motherboards, a problem that has now resurfaced and is creating unnecessary segmentation.

In response, McAfee said:

I know this has been a topic that honestly gets a lot of attention and discussion within AMD. I’m not kidding when I say this, I literally had three conversations on this topic today. And I’m not talking about members of the press, I’m talking about internal conversations within our engineering teams and planning teams to understand what options we have and what we can do, and how we can provide the right experience for a user with a motherboard of the 300 series that you want to upgrade to a 5000 series processor.

It is certainly something that we are not brushing aside and ignoring; We definitely understand that there is a large part of the community that is passionate about this. And we want to try to do the right thing. We keep working on it.

Due to the incredible number of processors supporting socket AM4 (the longest running desktop socket to date), AMD is struggling with a BIOS memory limitation. The memory that stores the BIOS and associated data that enables support for processors is not large enough to store data for the full line of processors and this has led to discontinuation of support on some platforms. In some cases, motherboard vendors have resorted to doing away with BIOS interfaces—that is, switching to simple text-based menus—to expand the number of supported processors.

there are more problems

“This created enormous complexity in supporting processor support,” McAffee explained. “We provide an AGESA update that has the ability to pick and choose which products are compatible. Of course, this is tied to our own internal AMD engineering validation matrix, which we work on every day in our own labs. That was the first step – we had to make some tough decisions about what would fit in 16MB of memory and what combinations of products made the most sense to be compatible.”

“The other thing is that a lot of the early 300 series motherboards don’t support the top of the range 5000 series CPUs. It’s very clear that if you bought a Ryzen 5950X, and you have a 300 series motherboard, performance will not be as expected. But AMD will provide that opportunity if it wants, it’s not about whether the motherboard is functionally capable of supporting the CPU, it’s about getting the maximum performance.”

At the moment, the official response from AMD is that these 300 series motherboards are not the best configuration for the Ryzen 5000.

Users have already found workarounds and modified firmware that allow Ryzen 5000 chips to work on officially unsupported 300 series motherboards, but since these configurations are unofficial, they void the warranty. The idea is to provide official solutions, although there is still work to be done to achieve this.

Do you have a 300 Series motherboard? Will they upgrade to Ryzen 5000 series if support is added?

Source: Tom’s Hardware