Modders enable Ryzen 5000 support on select ASRock X370 motherboads

Source: HKEPC

Hongkonger modders managed to enable Ryzen 5000 support via a modded BIOS on a select few ASRock X370 motherboards, most notably the X370 Taichi and X370 Fatal1ty Professional models.
According to the yet scarce information on HKEPC and the Tom’s Hardware translated article, the motherboards seem to have no trouble running with the 5000 series CPUs, despite the mod still being in a beta state of development.
The BIOS files are already available to the public to test, at their own risk.
As a current ASRock X370 owner, i’m super interested in how this is going to develop, i’m very happy with my motherboard and this mod could mean an even longer life span for it, provided i won’t need PCI-E 4.0 support anytime soon.
I also wonder if these modders, or maybe even another group of modders, will be able to replicate the support with motherboards from another brands, i think it could be a solution for those keen on keeping their expensive motherboards active and updated for a few more years.
What are your opinions on this?

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There is no reason this should not work with “every” am4 board. The danger is in the older components and their power delivery.

I think it is a good thing, but to be careful with. Worth it if you are getting 5000 series anyway and want to try and keep the motherboard but are prepared to lose it and get a 500 motherboard too.

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If you ask me its mental going down this path.

You’re going to spend big money on Ryzen 5k only to potentially compromise your system stability, reliability, etc, for saving the cost of a B550 board?

instead of say, selling the x370 plus your 1000/2000 series CPU to re-coup some cost and having a much better end system for basically the same changeover price?

nuts. that’s my opinion. every crash or system issue you have from that point forward will always have a question mark over it…

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I think that’s why they chose to develop this mod around the Taichi and Professional, both Tier-A motherboards, could be indeed dangerous to try this on a motherboard with a much weaker VRM.

I guess it comes to down to which market this is aimed at.
I could see, for example, this being a pretty compelling mod for some users in my country, where the hardware price ballooned considerably due to the inflation over the last few years, resulting in barely decent B550s today costing as much as high-end X370s cost back in 2017.
Of course this doesn’t address the issue with the cost of CPUs, which is still high even if you order from China.

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I still really don’t buy it.

In that market - Just take a small performance hit (maybe, single thread), save some money as well and run Ryzen 3000 series and have a system you know is actually a supported working configuration from your vendor?

Spending the money on a Ryzen 5000 processor, which is currently expensive and difficult to get (which shoots down the whole cost argument), and then skimping out on the board to this degree is insane.

5000 is maybe 15% faster than 3000 series at same clock, and you can get more cores for the money in 3000 to somewhat/mostly offset that. Unless you’re talking upper end 5000 series, at which point you’re back to spending big money for short supply anyway… and right now you can’t buy a GPU to push the 3000 series anyway…

Ryzen 3000 is still a really solid CPU family. It’s a big step up from 2000 (i have CPUs from both series right here and have tested 3300x and 2700x back to back) never mind 1000 series. I’m seriously considering a 3900X or 3950X as an upgrade for my X470 Taichi. Because bang for buck and board support wise it just makes so much more sense.

Most reasonable B550 boards also have WAY better memory topology (than either X370, X470 or even first gen X570 boards) for much faster memory speeds. So even if you get 5000 running in your X370 board, you’re leaving a heap of performance on the table - and no BIOS is going to upgrade the physical memory topology. B550 is more expensive than X370 because to be blunt - its better. Much better.

Better than X470 too unless you need some extremely niche X chipset feature. I can’t think of one? SLI? lol. More SATA ports? ok then…

They aren’t just high end X370 price where you are. They’re X370/X470 price (for similar quality) everywhere else as well.

Again… 5000 in x370 just makes no sense. Even if it was fully supported by the board vendor.

And it’s not.

And you can get B550 boards cheap. I picked up an entry level mATX B550 board for $158 australian (around $100 US). It’s happily driving a 3300x (will run 5000 series - probably even a 5900x if you aren’t stupid with overclocking), Vega64, nvme SSD, etc. Gigabyte B550M S2H. It was an experiment to see just “how bad” the cheapest, “nastiest” B550 board (and Ryzen build in general) i could find actually was.

I intended to replace my garbage tier NAS with it, but it actually runs a lot of games faster than my 2700x. Cinebench multi-thread, it’s around 70-75% of the X470+2700X combo. With half the cores. And the 2700x is on a 280mm AIO, the 3300x is on the 2700x box cooler.

It’s fine. I see no compelling need to upgrade it to be honest.

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I think i have to agree on this.
Although it´s kinda cool that “some” folks have achieved it.
I still think that AMD had a good reason to not offer backwards compatibillity.
I can’t really recommend it to people who are depening on their systems on a daily base.

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AMD’s guidance on AM4 power plane designs hasn’t changed since introduction. With the way TDC/EDC limits operate on Zen 3 you’d be extremely hard pressed to max out even the Carrizo reference VRM from 2016. You really have to go looking for trouble to break it. Just porting the chips wouldn’t do that.

If anything it’s amazing how much AMD fit within their original design limits…

Yes that overclocked result down at the bottom topping nearly 250W would constitute, “looking for trouble.”

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Yup.

I think some people have watched too many extreme overclocking videos (except for buildzoid’s one where he says “buy the cheapest board that does what you want” or the ones where he raves about how good b550 is - or about how even garbage tier VRMs on AMD boards are just fine unless you’re overclocking higher end SKUs)

Exactly this. Don’t get me wrong, its kinda neat that someone has hacked this to work… but practical application for real world? You’d be crazy to go down that path imho.

Or roughly equivalent to enabling multi core enhancement on rocket/comet lake :smiley:

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If I recall correctly, higher tiered X370 and X470 boards are able to run newer bioses, but the main issue was with bios memory capacity and power delivery. These two issues are partially mitigated on higher end boards.

I vaguely remember GN doing a piece on the B450 controversy, and they had explained why certain boards were able to get the new bios

Agreed there. I doubt anyone who can afford a Ryzen 5000 can’t afford a X570 or B550 board.
If anything this is cool as a show pc for the future when Ryzen 5000 hits the used market. It’s still a stretch because by then X570 and B550 boards will be cheaper as well. Really it would benefit people who bought god tier X370 boards and hold onto hardware longer than the average consumer.

Alternatively it can be the absolute cheapskates who will take extremely cheap motherboards with their repaired cpus

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I got a 5600X for MSRP and couldn’t get B550 ITX for less than a used X470 at the time. It’s weird justification that because you spend $300 on a CPU you should spend more on a board. If I bought the B550 ITX for $50 more I wouldn’t have got the 5600X in my budget, so not sure what the logic is there. B550 offered nothing extra (not even a better VRM for the form factor) over X470.

That has already happened. Not only has it happened, but ‘for parts’ units with bent and missing pins are showing up on eBay. I have a now functional 5800X here that I got for $270 as a parts unit just last week.

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It’s not always about means. I have a very reasonable income but would still totally do this mod just for the lulz. Hardware is boring if you just use it as intended. Hell recently I hacked the bios on an Msi x470 board to enable Sr iov and a lot of OC options.

Can I afford a top shelf motherboard? Yes.
Is it fun buying stuff? Not really.
Will hacking a bios to do shit it shouldn’t keep me entertained for days? Yes

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There is some vrm nonsense outside of blanket “this vrm can do this much power” on epyc, we put a epyc in a previous gen “compatible” mobo and even disabled cores and set tdp to what the board was capable and it was in a halt state every other second, wendell tried explain it to me but it was like a cave man listening to a lecture about algebra…

That said I don’t think desktop ryzen is that picky because it plays fast and loose on reliability or something like that

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Running unsupported CPUs in a motherboard is certainly playing fast and loose with reliability. On the other hand a reasonably high end x370 should have plenty of VRM capability to handle something like a 5600x at stock clocks.

Let’s not forget that these types of mods have existed for decades. On LGA775 you could hack the bios to make it accept Xeons (just needed some tape on the CPU).

When I was a poor teenager rocking a locked AMD Athlon XP 2400+ on a Socket A motherboard I shorted individual pins on the bottom of the CPU with single strands of copper wire to force it to run with a different base clock.

Are any of the above supported? No
Are they fun? Hell yea :smiley:

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