Due to the limited capacity of its motherboards’ EEPROMs, MSI had to reduce its BIOSes in order to fit the AGESA combo microcode for Ryzen 3000 compatibility. The result is a barebones BIOS (“GSE Lite”) with a new but basic, low-resolution UI that lacks many of the original’s features.
MSI also had to drop support for A-series and Athlon processors to get the microcode to fit. That’s a trivial loss (the goal here, obviously, is to install a Zen 2 chip), but then there’s the fact that the RAID module was removed, too, breaking SATA RAID on some of the boards.
Some are blaming manufacturers for being cheap and using low-capacity modules, while others suggest UEFI or AGESA is too bloated.
The scary part? Many other motherboard brands appear to be using 16-megabyte EEPROMs on their older socket AM4 motherboards. These companies are bound to run into similar ROM capacity issues unless they keep their UEFI setup programs lightweight. Motherboards based on the latest X570 chipset feature 32-megabyte EEPROMs. The AMD X570 chipset lacks support for not just “Bristol Ridge,” but also first-generation Ryzen “Summit Ridge” and “Raven Ridge” processors.