More than a year after their launch, AMD has finally opened up Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPU support on their first-gen AM4 300-series platform.
AMD Brings Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPU Support On AM4 300-Series Motherboards Including X370, B350 & A320
It was a long battle between AMD and its board partners on whether they should or shouldn't enable support for Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPUs on first-gen platforms. Due to heated backlash, consumers did bring Ryzen 5000 CPU support on the 400-series platforms but the 300-series motherboards were never officially supported.
While AMD was against the decision, asking motherboard makers to focus on the sales of their newer chipset motherboards, motherboard makers did release unofficial BIOS firmware which allowed Zen 3 support on their 300-series motherboards based on X370, B350 & A320 chipsets. However, most of these motherboard makers later rolled back the support and removed BIOS from their official motherboard pages.
This changes today and Intel's Alder Lake is once again the main reason why AMD is making this move. Intel Alder Lake, owing to its impressive price to performance numbers & recent entry-tier offerings such as the H610, B660 & H670 offerings (with DDR4 support) prompted many first-gen Ryzen users to go the blue team route. AMD opening up support for Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPUs on their first-gen motherboards would mean that they can make users stick to their current platform while offering them something new till Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000 CPUs launch later this year.
The support from AMD is great news for entry-level and budget users. All of AMD's board partners will be rolling out respective BIOS for their motherboards in the coming weeks to enable the Ryzen 5000 CPU support. The BIOS will be based on the AGESA 1.2.0.7 firmware which is based on a new code and features more performance optimizations and fixes than the previous AGESA 1.2.0.6 and its subsequent patches (A/B/C).
