Monday, April 15th 2019
MSI Betrays AMD's Socket AM4 Longevity Promise: No Zen2 for 300-series?
Greedy motherboard vendors such as MSI want you to buy a new motherboard every two generations of processor for no sound reason at all. MSI is reportedly blocking support for 3rd generation Ryzen "Matisse" processors on its AMD 300-series chipset motherboards, including those based on high-end AMD X370 and OC-capable B350 chipsets. This would also put those who own $300 motherboards such as the X370 XPower out of luck. To recap, AMD announced on numerous occasions that it doesn't want to be a greedy clique like its competitor, by forcing motherboard upgrades and promised that socket AM4 motherboards will be backwards and forwards compatible with at least four generations of Ryzen processors, running all the way up to 2020.
This normally should mean that any 300-series motherboard must support 4th generation Ryzen processors with a simple BIOS update. Most 300-series motherboards, including from MSI, even ship with USB BIOS Flashback feature to help with forwards compatibility. Unfortunately, motherboard companies such as MSI care more about their bottom-lines than the consumer. In a support e-mail to an X370 XPower Titanium owner, MSI confirmed that it will not extend Zen 2 support to AMD 300-series. Other motherboard vendors could follow MSI's suit as a representative of another motherboard vendor, on condition of anonymity, told TechPowerUp that "Zen 2" processors have steeper electrical requirements that 300-series motherboards don't meet. This is an excuse similar to the one Intel gave for the planned obsolescence of its 100-series and 200-series chipsets, even as it was repeatedly proven that those motherboards can run and overclock 9th generation processors with custom firmware just fine. Would MSI care to explain whether a B450M PRO-M2 has a stronger VRM than an X370 XPower Titanium to warrant "Zen 2" support? Will all "Zen 2" processor SKUs have steep electrical requirements? Will there not be any SKUs with double-digit-Watt TDP ratings?
Update (16/04): MSI posted a clarification on this issue.
Source:
master3553 (Reddit)
This normally should mean that any 300-series motherboard must support 4th generation Ryzen processors with a simple BIOS update. Most 300-series motherboards, including from MSI, even ship with USB BIOS Flashback feature to help with forwards compatibility. Unfortunately, motherboard companies such as MSI care more about their bottom-lines than the consumer. In a support e-mail to an X370 XPower Titanium owner, MSI confirmed that it will not extend Zen 2 support to AMD 300-series. Other motherboard vendors could follow MSI's suit as a representative of another motherboard vendor, on condition of anonymity, told TechPowerUp that "Zen 2" processors have steeper electrical requirements that 300-series motherboards don't meet. This is an excuse similar to the one Intel gave for the planned obsolescence of its 100-series and 200-series chipsets, even as it was repeatedly proven that those motherboards can run and overclock 9th generation processors with custom firmware just fine. Would MSI care to explain whether a B450M PRO-M2 has a stronger VRM than an X370 XPower Titanium to warrant "Zen 2" support? Will all "Zen 2" processor SKUs have steep electrical requirements? Will there not be any SKUs with double-digit-Watt TDP ratings?
335 Comments on MSI Betrays AMD's Socket AM4 Longevity Promise: No Zen2 for 300-series?
Guess I'll avoid them in the future
I think some people here don't know the financial context.
MSI, a company heavily focused on gaming stuff (mobo, GPU, laptops) has a yearly revenue of $3.5B.
Asus, doing all kinds of stuff for many consumer segments (and professionals as well) is around $14B.
ASRock, as interesting as it may be, sells for $0.3B. So it's 10x smaller than MSI.
And BTW: AMD revenue is $6.5B.
Don't underestimate this leak. If it's true, it's quite likely other companies will follow.
More FUD? :D
Their video cards are even worse - at least the ones using AMD GPUs. I owned a couple of Asus R9 280x (DirectCU II) cards in the past - both started to freeze the system after a few months of use - turns out the video bios was poorly set up and the board's cooling did not properly accommodate the power delivery circuits - that caused them to overheat (temps over 110C) and deliver unstable current. They were both fixed with a modified bios witch dropped the clocks from 1050 to 1000Mhz on the core and upped the vcore a bit - that kept the VRMs from going over 100C in typical usage scenarios. A permanent fix would have been a better cooler. The trend continues with my Asus ROG STRIX Vega64 Gamig OC - alltough a custom designed board, it will not go over 1600MHz. In fact in most cases it hovers around 1550mhz - witch is a really poor clock speed for a custom board. On the other hand, the Frontier Edition Vega64 I picked up off a miner a couple of days ago can go as high as 1700MHz on it's shitty blower style cooler... Asus have really gone down the loo in the last 4-5 years. I haven't owned any nvidia cards made by Asus (I usually stick to Zotac, EVGA or MSI for nvidia cards), maybe those are better. They make
goodgreat gaming laptops (stay away from their entry level stuff tough, it's pure garbage) and decent monitors, but that's where I draw the line.In fact no company makes great products all across their product line...
- Gigabyte - excellent hardware, poor UEFI design and implementation. Hard to navigate and limited options even on some higher end boards. Sometimes overclocking just doesn't work as well as on competitive board. They are pretty reliable boards tough, and are the best value/reliability in my country. They do have a knack of using higher end components and chipsets on low or low-mid end boards - like the GA-AB350M-DS3H. One would thing it's a b350 board right? Well it's not. It's in fact a budget x370 chipset implementation: www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-AB350M-DS3H-rev-1x#sp
- Biostar - make the best low-end boards I've ever used. Bios isn't bad either. I use their boards whenever I have to sell larger volumes of budget computers. Very few (if any) RMA requests. Their high-end boards aren't bad either - great OC performance, even on AMD platforms, good UEFI implementation and good build quality - the only problem is price. Biostar's flagship boards cost as much (if not more) then an equivalent Asrock or Gigabyte product with the same specs. They're boards are also kind of "chinese" looking (design-wise) and it puts people off.
- MSI - great high-end boards and decent reliability - although they've made some questionable design choices with their latest flagship products. It seems to me they're trying to pass off cost cutting methods as advances or features (talking about their suspicious dual VRMs in particular). Overclocking on their mid-end products is hit and miss. Their high-end stuff is great but hard to come by where I live -and rather expensive. Their mid-range boards are kind of crap - stay away from them. They're low end boars are also great - simple and well priced, good build quality and decent reliability.
- Asrock - excellent high-end boards, and best value/performance/features over anything on the market today. Not the greatest overclockers tough, although they have the hardware for it, some boards simply don't OC as well as they shroud. Asrock is pretty consistent across all their product lineup - so you can't really ever go wrong when buying an asrock board, be it low end or a flagship model.
- EVGA - great product line - probably the best performance + reliability out of the lot - but also the most expensive by far (at least where I'm from), and they limit themselves to intel platforms. Nowadays most uses want* an AMD rig (2600 and 1600x are my best sellers by a huge margin) and EVGA will only make intel and nvidia products. Their loss.
*most of my clients value price/performance over anything else - so they'll only stretch their budget so far. AMD offers 6 cores and 12 theards + motherboard + wraith cooler for 270-310$ while an intel core i5 9600k (cpu alone) is ~300$.
AMD's strategy of long-lasting sockets is harming mobo makers. AMD is taking the profit they would keep in the Intel world.
Consumers would possibly be less likely to upgrade their Summit Ridge + 300 series board to an all new 2019 CPU + board because it would cost more when you need a new board.
This would hurt sales of both CPU's and boards. Have you even seen all threads all over the place with 300/400 series boards waiting to be upgraded?
People feel the itch to upgrade, but if you need a new board as well you're likely not as tempted anymore.
Ryzen 1000 Summit Ridge is by no means that bad, and it would only encourage people to wait for the next socket.
As a consequence, if you upgrade anyway, that used 300 board is worth even less when you sell it, just because it won't work with new CPU's. This makes the upgrade even more expensive.
For instance, if MSI were that greedy they'd stop consumers from using Kaby Lake CPU's in 100 series boards. Yes, Intel usually only keep the same socket for only two generations, but this would easily change for the worse if it was as simple as you describe.
Besides, how will this help MSI? The whole internet is pissed off now.
Bad consumers!
To think that MSI doesn't know the customer retention value of a "simple BIOS update".....(I'll get in trouble if I complete this sentence)
Upon what knowledge does the author assert that all it takes is a "simple BIOS update"?
Why does this matter? Because BS like this "news" leads to: (not picking on you @ZoneDymo )For the record, I own one of those X370 XPower Titanium motherboards.
This story falls square in the hard-to-believe category
You'd think they would at least honor the commitment AMD made but no......
This along with using the absolutely poorest quality components (Nikos) possible to run in a board just screams "No" to me.
However one good point was brought up, they could all do this because all have with Intel as a point of fact and history seen so far.
Their GPU quality, and again, not a matter for this thread, since it is about motherboards, is top-notch.