Ryzen 5000 on B450 / X470 Boards – NOT IRREVERSIBLE

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If, like me, you didn’t think running Ryzen 5000 series CPUs on B450 or X470 boards was going to be possible until January as AMD first said, rejoice! Thanks to Dr Hex from the stream last night, I found out that most manufacturers have either leaked or purposefully published the early BIOS updates needed to get the new CPUs working on older boards. So, I’ve got a B450 board, and an X470 one to test out with a 5900X, stick the new BIOS files on and see how it goes.

Now there are a few things you need to know before updating your board. AMD, and the motherboard vendors, claim this is an irreversible change that will lock your board to that BIOS version meaning it will not support 1st or 2nd gen Ryzen CPUs ever again, nor the earlier APUs. As far as support goes, assume if you are doing this, you won’t have any from AMD nor your motherboard maker.

So there’s your disclaimer, now lets get this set up and have a play. I’m going to start with this X470 Gaming 7 board from Gigabyte as I haven’t updated the BIOS on this one yet, so I can walk you through the process. First, you’ll need to be able to boot with a 2nd, or 3rd gen CPU if you’ve already updated the BIOS to support the latter. Next, download the newest BIOS version, in Gigabyte’s case, that’s F60c. Download the file, extract it’s contents to a USB stick, ideally an empty one, then boot to the BIOS by spamming the delete key. Find the flash utility, pick the new file and hit start. Don’t touch anything until it restarts on it’s own. An important note is if you are using a 2nd gen CPU with this, its not meant to be able to boot with that CPU once the update is done, so in theory you’ll need your 3rd or 5th gen CPU to hand.

I say in theory, because in here is a Ryzen 2700, I’ve just finished updating the BIOS, and.. Well.. look. It’s booting just fine. I even ran Cinebench on the B450 board and everything worked just fine. It was stable, no errors or bluescreens. Of course, since I didn’t test it fully like it was my main daily driver PC I can’t say for 100% sure it’ll work for you, but it seems promising that at least 2nd gen Ryzen CPU support isn’t gone when you do update. That’s enough of the old chips though, lets drop in the 5900X.

So, new chip is in and booting up fine. Lets jump into the BIOS and take a look. First things first, enable XMP. That works fine. There is also now resizeable BAR support – the key feature that lets AMD’s new smart access memory feature from their new RX 6000 series GPUs work – so with this update that should work too although sadly I don’t have any of those new GPUs so I can’t test that one today.

Let’s boot into Windows, maybe run cinebench too while we are at it. While it boots I should mention, for those that are hoping PCIe Gen 4 would be enabled here, sadly not, even for the top M.2 slot that’s directly connected to the CPU. It’s a bit of a shame I know as technically I’m pretty sure it’s possible, but ah well.

Right, so this all works fine, lets drop in the B450 board and see how that holds up. I’m using an ASROCK Steel Legend board, which is actually one of the more budget options. It’s got a relatively puny 4 phase VRM setup, and when new was only a little over £100 / $100. Can it handle a brand new 12 core? Lets see.

Right, booted up, XMP on, and HWInfo up. I’m running blender to stress the VRMs here, it’s drawing the full 140W you can expect from any of the 12 or 16 core chips, and, yeah, boost is holding fine, it’s not obviously dropping voltage under load. It actually posted a score 200 points higher than I’ve had before on B550 and X570 boards for this chip, making for an interesting result..

There is one more thing I want to show you though. On this USB stick I have a BIOS file for this ASROCK B450 board that is a couple versions old, and doesn’t support 5th gen CPUs. Let’s boot into the BIOS and write this one instead. Bare in mind, AMD claim this shouldn’t be possible. You should not be able to revert your changes, your board is meant to be locked for life. Being honest, when I first heard that I called BS on that, and, oh it’s done. And the system doesn’t boot now, because the BIOS update worked and it no longer supports the 5900X that’s in there.

Between the lie about supporting 2nd gen CPUs, and the lie that it’s irreversible, I’m left feeling incredibly frustrated with AMD here. These claims then, I can only assume, were made to try and dissuade customers from using their perfectly functional motherboards with the new CPUs, and force an upgrade to a newer B550 or X570 board instead. Hell, they had to be forced to even offer this support, and locked it away for an extra month or two just to trick as many people as possible into new boards.

Now, I’ve only got a very small sample size of two boards I can test on, and one Ryzen 5000 CPU, so I would very much like to see someone like Gamers Nexus or Hardware Unboxed test this out with their kit as they’ll have a much wider selection of boards and chips to test with than I.

As a final note, AMD, if you are watching, please don’t double down on this. Don’t force motherboard vendors to stay true to your original party line. People dislike Intel for their anti-consumer behaviours, don’t follow them, be better. Please.