The ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0 got a lot of attention recently when the sub-$100 motherboard was spotted running an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. Now, the motherboard is in the spotlight again, as ASRock has seemingly prepared a new firmware for it to support Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) and Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) CPUs.
As per the Chiphell forums, the A320M-HDV R4.0 has successfully housed the Ryzen 9 5950X, AMD's 16-core flagship Zen 3 chip, despite A320 motherboards not receiving official Ryzen 5000 support. ASRock has been one of the few motherboard vendors that informally provides support for newer Ryzen processors on long-forgotten AM4 motherboards. Apparently, the A320M-HDV R4.0 happily accepts Ryzen 5000 chips as long as it's on the P4.03 firmware, which is dated November 3. The latest available firmware on ASRock's website for the A320M-HDV R4.0 is P4.00, so we suspect that the P4.03 is an alpha firmware that was inadvertently leaked.
On a sidenote, the P4.03 firmware reportedly adds support for Renoir as well. A Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G APU was sighted on the A320M-HDV R4.0 with a whopping FCLK up to 2,166 MHz. Due to the nature of Renoir's design, the Zen 2 APUs have more forgiving memory controllers and it's not a coincidence that the world record for fastest DDR4 memory (DDR4-6666.6) was set with a Ryzen 7 4700GE, another member of the Renoir army.
It's unclear if the situation with the A320M-HDV R4.0 is an isolated occurrence or if ASRock is secretly working on new firmwares for the brand's other 300-series motherboards. We've reached out to the motherboard vendor for comment.
