If you own an MSI B450 or X470 motherboard, you should be all set for AMD’s Zen 3-based processors. During the latest episode of MSI Insider, Eric Van Beurden and Michiel Berkhout confirmed that Ryzen 4000 support would not be exclusive to its “MAX” variants, which offer a bigger, 32 MB flash memory chip for larger BIOS updates. Owners of the original SKUs should be able to upgrade to Zen 3 just fine – although there are a few caveats they should keep in mind.
“With our MAX motherboards, this is no problem at all, but if you have some other motherboard, it will be quite tricky because most of them only have a 16 MB BIOS,” warned Van Beurden. “You will drop some support for CPUs.”
“And also, you’ll have a toned-down version of the BIOS, so instead of the full Click BIOS, we have Click BIOS Lite, where the graphical interface is simplified a little bit to save some space in the BIOS file,” Michiel Berkhout added. “This is not a problem on the MAX models, which have a bigger BIOS size than the regular B450 and X470 models.”
In its original Socket AM4 support scheme, AMD claimed that it couldn’t add Zen 3 support to X470 and B450 motherboards due to the limited capacity of their flash memory chips. While red team has since reversed that decision, the excuse is still amusing to read in light of what manufacturers such as MSI are doing. It’ll be interesting to see whether others follow suit, or if profits will ultimately win the day.