AMD bids adieu to socket AM4 by extending Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 support to all 300-series AM4 motherboards including the A320 chipset ^↺

Support for AMD Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 Vermeer CPUs on first generation 300-series motherboards has been sketchy so far. While we have seen OEMs like ASRock offering drop-in support for Ryzen 5000 CPUs on several X370 offerings via unofficial alpha BIOS updates, AMD has so far maintained that it had no plans to support these CPUs on 300-series boards. That changes today.

AMD has confirmed that it is expanding support for drop-in compatibility of Ryzen 5000 CPUs across the entire 300-series chipset range. This includes boards based on the X370, B350, and even A320 chipsets. According to an infographic published by AMD, motherboard OEMs can be expected to offer selective beta BIOS updates to their first generation 300-series offerings starting April. 

This means that every Zen 3 CPU available today, including the new Ryzen 7 5800X3D, should be compatible with the entirety of socket AM4 boards available should the board manufacturer decide to enable support.

AMD will be providing AGESA 1.2.0.7 to board manufacturers soon, which will enable broader Zen 3 support. However, OEMs will have to further tweak the AGESA base and add their own platform features, which means the rollout may eventually take some time. 

That being said, it is unlikely that OEMs will offer upgrades to the entirety of their product stack. The older boards do present certain limitations such limited overclocking support and lack of PCIe Gen 4. AMD's move can be taken as showing a hats off to the AM4 platform and giving users of older boards one final opportunity to upgrade to Zen 3.

Later this year, we expect AMD to introduce the Zen 4 Raphael series, which will be based on socket AM5. Zen 4 will mark the transition to an LGA socket similar to Intel chips and will feature integrated RDNA 2 graphics along with support for PCIe Gen 5 and DDR5 memory.

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