ASRock Officially Offers Ryzen 5000 Support on its X370 Motherboards
Mike Sanders / 3 years ago
Although there have been a number of potential workarounds users could make with their 300-series motherboards, the short version is that Ryzen 5000 was, generally speaking, not compatible with the platform. Representing effectively the first time there was a gateway on AMD’s AM4 Ryzen, if you were going to make up the upgrade to Ryzen 5000, it required a 400-series motherboard, or better.
Earlier this week, however, AMD made overtures that they were still actively investigating the possibility of bringing widespread 300-series motherboard support to Ryzen 5000 CPUs, and following a report via Videocardz, it seems that ASRock is one of the first manufacturers to make the breakthrough!
ASRock Officially Brings Ryzen 5000 to its X370 Motherboard
ASRock has generally represented one of the best options for users attempting to get Ryzen 5000 to work on their 300-series motherboards. To date, however, this support has largely only been partial (for specific processors). – Following the release of a new BIOS update for its X370 Pro4, however, ASRock has confirmed that this motherboard now offers full Ryzen 5000 support.
More so, they are now expected to roll out this BIOS update for at least all of their other X370 motherboards in the very near future!
What’s Taken So Long?
The biggest issue with Ryzen 5000 compatibility on 300-series motherboards was been the exceptionally limited amount of data it could store. To correctly support processors and RAM XMP configurations, motherboards come with a small slice of storage space to accommodate this information. With Ryzen 5000, however, this was simply too much for it to retain (a factor overcome in 400/500-series as the storage capacity was increased).
The only real potential workaround was to massively cut down the overall aesthetic of the BIOS while still making it entirely functional for users. One option, for example, was to remove flashy menus and replace them with text-only interfaces. And even then, many motherboard manufacturers had been struggling with, as above, ASRock the only one to really either find or pursue some success. With this news, however, it appears that ASRock may have finally found a way to, somehow, squeeze all that information within the motherboards exceptionally limited data.
While this BIOS update is available to download now for the X370 Pro4, with further updates expected very shortly for their other X370 motherboards, however, the question does still remain as to whether this will be possible on their B350 designs. – For the moment, however, I daresay many consumers will gratefully accept this excellent news that their ASRock X370 should, all going well, now be fully ready for a Ryzen 5000 upgrade!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!