ASRock is the first motherboard manufacturer to add support for AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors to its boards equipped with the higher-end 300-series chipsets, as promised by AMD's David McAfee.
The company's boards are equipped with higher-end 300-series chipsets. Due to BIOS changes, it is possible that the X370 boards will now support Zen 3 processors.
And that means that older X370 motherboards may now tolerate Zen3 processors such as the Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 5 5600X. The ASRock X370 Pro motherboard is the first to reap the benefits of this update. The trade-off that upgraders must make is that ASRock will no longer support AMD Bristol Ridge APUs in their motherboards (launched mid-2017). In addition, while ASRock has not stated that it will eliminate support for previous-generation Ryzen processors, it does urge that you do not update if your computer is equipped with a Pinnacle, Raven, or Summit Ridge processor.
Even once these BIOS upgrades begin to roll out, X370 motherboards and the lower-tier 300 series boards are still not the ideal choices for AMD's current-generation processors, according to the company. The platform upgrades that users have experienced with new 400- and 500-series motherboards are not going to materialize with a new BIOS, and as AMD has warned, some of the top-end Vermeer processors "will not deliver the performance that the product is capable of," due to factors such as PCIe Gen 4.0, PBO, SAM, and improved power delivery features on newer designs, among other things. Despite this, users should be able to keep the majority of the performance gains achieved over prior-generation processors. Following the release of this upgrade, ASRock's footsteps are likely to be followed by those of other manufacturers such as Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, among others. As we observed last year, several of these other vendors were willing and able to update their A320 motherboards to support Ryzen 5000 processors quickly and efficiently.
It will be interesting to see if other motherboard manufactures adopt the same strategy of fully removing Bristol Ridge support in order to pack the necessary code into the BIOS in order to support Vermeer processors. Maintaining an eye out for changes over the following few weeks might be worthwhile if you're still using an AMD 300-series motherboard and hankering after a Vermeer processor.
ASRock is the first company to support AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs on the X370 platform.
