I’ve done a bunch of searching and haven’t found anything concrete - but I have an Acer Helios 500 (am4 r7 2700 and mobile vega56, b450 chipset) and I also have both a 3700X and 3950X in other PC’s I can play around with. Acer has not released a bios to support zen2 and don’t appear to be inclined to do so. What I’d like to do is fairly straightforward - plop a zen2 in this bad boy and have fun. It can handle 105W cpu’s without issue as a few people have dropped 2700X’s in, and I’ve pushed the 2700 in it to 4.0 all core at 1.325V, but that’s still ~15% slower than a 3700X at stock. I’d also consider putting a 3950X in it at some point if the 3700X works, but that would probably be overkill as I only use the 8 core to it’s max maybe 20% of the time I use the thing, and I could use the large boost in lightly threaded apps that zen2 gives the rest of the time. It’d be hard to resist dropping the 3950X just to test if I could get the 3700X working first, though.
The only solutions I’ve seen mentioned are to do some bios surgery and insert the updated microcode - or to find a desktop b450 board that uses the same bios and has updates. I’m not sure that’s possible given the integrated vega56, which I don’t think there are any other examples of.
I haven’t found any examples or walk throughs on modifying the bios, so figured I’d post here as Wendell mentioned doing something similar back in July when zen2 launched. I’m willing to invest some money in the project to get equipment if necessary and don’t care too much if I brick the PC, though I’d obviously prefer not to. I’ve had it for a little over a year and it’s been pretty solid, but it’s a 2nd/3rd system so could be sacrificed in the name of science…Anyone have any ideas or an idea on where to start? I work in software engineering and have a degree in semiconductor engineering, so if it gets very technical I can probably wade through it, albeit slowly.