Recently Ryzen 2 CPUs have been released and it is an opportunity to validate reality of AM4 platform. AMD promised and delivers backwards and future compatibility between CPUs and chipsets but as turns out motherboard manufacturers failed by going cheap with some components.
The latest AMD’s chipset is X570 and every motherboard with this chipset has EEPROM BIOS module of 256Mb (32MB) size and here start problems to anyone who owns a decent motherboard on previous chipsets (B350, B450, X370, X470) and wants to upgrade CPU to latest Ryzen 2. As it turns out manufacturers with many models went cheap route or just didn’t include future-proofing in design and did use lower capacity BIOS modules of size 128Mb (16MB).
This is not isolated to few models or to specific vendor or price range as issue is wide across all brands. MSI, Gigabyte, Asrock… and so on. MSI released interesting blog post about their beta BIOS updates for older chipsets to support Ryzen 2. Just in case if MSI would like to mess something about that post I will just post a screenshot of that page instead:
Let me break it through for you. In this article you can see that MSI workarounds 16MB limitation just to add support of latest CPUs. First workaround which IMO should be done in all UEFIs is optimized visuals of UEFI menu. This is Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), not disco party operating system so visuals should be last thing to design in it, not overdesigned in Photoshop with loads of animations and many useless “aesthetic” features. GUI should be simplistic and useful. Another crucial but destroying a product workaround is removing support of some APUs. This is just bad, MSI decided to break their products in order to make them support new CPUs. Imagine that: you upgrade your BIOS to add support for your new 3900x, you have a friend who just purchased second-hand APU and is waiting for motherboard for it. Said wants to check if APU works properly so friend comes over to you to and you can’t do this in simple way, you have to downgrade bios first so this removes support for your CPU but brings back support for that APU. You put that APU into motherboard and if it is ok then ok but what if APU turns out to be dead? Well, hard time incoming. Of course this story about friend is extremely rare thing to happen in your actual life. Last and in many cases the worst and real workaround is by removing RAID support. Right under list of boards you can see such sentence:
“* If you already set RAID for your system, please don`t update these beta BIOS as they are not ready for raid function.”
What this means is in beta they removed support for RAID and they MAY bring it back in final builds. So MSI basically breaks their products in order to add support for Zen 2. This is bad and highly anticonsumer move.
I’m using MSI only as an example, other manufacturers are doing more or less the same. For example Gigabyte also removed support for older APUs, like in case of GA-AX370-Gaming K3:
Instead of workarounding things when it is too late these motherboards should have been designed to have 32MB EEPROM modules, especially one of features AMD claimed with AM4 was and still is backwards and future compatibility in AM4 range of products.
But now? When there is so many 16MB EEPROM module motherboards customers should RMA them as broken products. Manufacturers should offer, if these modules are socketable (on some motherboards are), free upgrade to 32MB to every user who contacts them. Proper workaround which manufacturers can deliver is to release Zen 1 and Zen 2 separate BIOS releases but this still would be just acceptable workaround, not proper fix to this big issue.
spectatorx 