It has been topic of discussion in the past, and it is now again. Ryzen Series 5000 will be supported on Series 500 motherboards. But to what extent will Series 400 be supported? Months ago the discussion was that BIOSes with 16MB storage cannot support the new processors storage wise.
For Ryzen 3000 a lot of space had been made in the 16MB EPROM by stripping away the GUI interface as well as some older processor support. AMD received a lot of criticism when Ryzen 5000 /ZEN3 would only see Series 500 Support. They quickly altered that statement by offering support in the firmware that has a 32MB BIOS file-size. Over the weekend you have been able to see numerous BIOS updates, but all for Series 500 motherboards. It might be the case that once again support for Series 400 is lifted, but not by AMD, but by the board partners.
ASUS today finds themselves in a peculiar situation, a consumer asked ASUS if they plan to update the Crosshair VII Hero X470 motherboard with support for AMD's upcoming Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, the company gave an adverse answer. Here is the quote below:
ASUS Support
Thank you for contacting ASUS Product Support.My name is John L. and it's my pleasure to help you with your problem.
I am writing this email to provide you an update about your ongoing case. According to our engineers, We have no plans for the Crosshair VII Hero to support the Ryzen 5900X, please purchase Crosshair VIII Hero and any Ass B550 motherboard that will support Ryzen 5900X and 5000 series processors. Do you have feedback that you would like to share about your experience with our CEO? We’d love to hear about it!
From the looks of things, ASUS is recommending users to upgrade to new motherboards with no support of AMD's Ryzen 5000 CPU series on 400 series chipset on their motherboards. Then again, customer services have been wrong so many times in the past as well.
We've reached out to ASUS moments ago to clear up this statement. Currently, HQ is working on a statement that will be released to media later today. We'll update accordingly.
Update: AMD (earlier on already) has mentioned the 400 Series will get firmware in January to support Ryzen 5000.
Update2:
And here is the statement from ASUS, they will offer Series 400 Chipset support with selected motherboards starting in January 2021. Which is in line with what AMD has been stating.
-- ASUS --
ASUS is to follow AMD’s decision: beta BIOS support for 400-series motherboards will be ready starting in Jan/2021, all ASUS X470, B450 & B450 II motherboards available on the market will be compatible via a BIOS update. When or if AMD sends us the required Agesa update, ASUS will follow AMD’s support plan to release the new BIOS.
