ASRock produces semi-official beta BIOSes supporting Ryzen 5000 on 300-series chipset motherboards
Ryzen 5000 only worked on X570, B550 and A520 chipsets initially, and 400-series chipsets are only now receiving support. Even these were not planned to get it at first, so support on even older 300-series chipsets seemed impossible for a long time. But here’s the good news: in the end, such an upgrade may work. It seems ASRock released BIOS updates for their X370, B350 and A320 motherboards that add support for the new Zen 3 processors.
AMD originally announced that Ryzen 5000 will not work with B450 and X470 chipsets, but then reconsidered and promised some limited (or at least that has been cautioned back then) form of support. However, the company keeps insisting that A320, B350 and X370 chipsets will not see any such concessions. There was a reported success with a particular ASRock B350 motherboard, but only because the user used BIOS for a very similar B450 model and it happened to work due to sheer luck. But now the situation is starting to look more promising, because something more official has emerged.
Hong Kong’s HKEPC website has published an article with download links to BIOS updates that add support for new processors for almost all ASRock boards based on X370 chipset and several boards with B350 and A320 chipsets:
- A320M Pro4
- A320M-HDV
- A320M-HDV R3.0
- A320M-HDV R4.0
- A320M-ITX
- AB350 Gaming K4
- AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac
- AB350M-HDV
- X370 Gaming X
- X370 Killer SLI
- X370 Pro4
- X370M Pro4
- X370 Professional Gaming
- X370 Taichi
- X370M-HDV
- X370 Gaming-ITX/ac
Download links can be found at HKEPC or in this directory on their server. Google Drive links can also be found on Reddit (these are even less official though, we would advise to download from HKEPC for security reasons).
These BIOSes should allow the operation of not only Ryzen 5000, ie new „Vermeer“ Zen 3 CPUs, but also the 7nm Ryzen 4000 „Renoir“ APUs. So those of you waiting for them can also enjoy. By the way: these APUs are not generally available in retail, but the Czech outfit Mironet has a quad-core and hexa-core SKUs in stock, so there are paths to get hold of them.
AMD continues to not officially support these new processors on motherboards with these chipsets, and this support from ASRock is probably semi-official at best too. Perhaps even experimental. These BIOSes are probably of Beta quality, so for now it is probably good to be cautious. We do not know how buggy these are and whether it will be possible to run Zen 3 CPUs reliably and without problems in day-to-day use. It remains to be seen whether some functions will be missing. It is also quite likely that these BIOS updates remove support for older Ryzen CPUs (1000, 2000), so be careful before flashing your board.
Due to the beta (or even alpha?) stage of these BIOS updates, proceed with caution and remember the risks involved in Beta BIOS flashing if you decide to try this. Although the updates should come from ASRock and not a third party, problems can’t be ruled out.
In any case though, with this it seems there aren’t any major technical problems that rule out operation of Ryzen 5000 on 300-series motherboards and it’s just a matter of whether the motherboard manufacturers want to get the job done (which however might involve dealing with issues that would need further efforts to debug and fix). For owners of ASRock boards, this is good news in any case. The question is whether something similar can be expected from other motherboard brands. Asus/Gigabyte/MSI might join ASRock and offer updates least for some of the more premium and popular B350/X370 boards, but this isn’t certain. How high the chances are is unclear and hard to guess now.
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- ASRock produces semi-official beta BIOSes supporting Ryzen 5000 on 300-series chipset motherboards
