Asus X570 Motherboard Delivers First-Gen AMD Ryzen Support

Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming

Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming (Image credit: Asus)

AMD doesn't officially support Ryzen 1000-series (Summit Ridge) chips on the X570 chipset, but Asus has added it to its motherboard. The latest firmware, spotted via @Komachi, for the ROG Strix X570-E Gaming brings full support for Summit Ridge chips and the long forgotten Raven Ridge APUs.

The motivation for not supporting previous generations of Ryzen CPUs on some AMD motherboards comes down to the size of the motherboard's BIOS chip. With every Ryzen launch, AMD provides its partners with the corresponding microcode to get the new chips to work on previous motherboards. Eventually, the BIOS chips run out of space, and compromises are made. Motherboard vendors that foresaw this limitation wisely incorporated bigger BIOS chips into their offerings.

In Asus' case, the company endowed the ROG Strix X570-E Gaming with a 32MB BIOS chip, which is why the motherboard has the luxury of supporting three generations of Ryzen processors, plus the APUs. There are many other high-end X570 motherboards on the market that pack one 32MB BIOS chip or a combination of two 16MB chips, but those boards don't offer the same level of support as the ROG Strix X570-E Gaming.

Asus ROG Strix X570-E Gaming CPU support list (Image credit: Asus)

It's unknown if Asus' BIOS chip will be large enough to support the Ryzen 4000-series (Vermeer) desktop CPUs when they come out. Asus might have to go back and ax support for some of the older models once those chips land. 

A DigiTimes report from two weeks ago said that the 7nm Ryzen 4000-series' release date will be at the end of Q3 barring any setbacks.

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • Kamen Rider Blade
    Is it possible for the BIOS Programmer to separate the Vendor specific UEFI code and graphics assets into their own 16/32 MiB chip and the CPU specific AGESA code into it's own 16/32/64 MiB chip?

    This way there would be enough space for all?
    Reply
  • paulewills1
    Bios ver. 1409 isn't listed on ASUS's site.
    Reply
  • zhiyeliu
    paulewills1 said:
    Bios ver. 1409 isn't listed on ASUS's site.
    That's weird. It's showing up for me.

    65
    Reply
  • slash3
    All X570 boards running AGESA 1.0.0.4 or newer support 1st-gen Ryzen. The microcode was reunified under this revision six months ago, but nobody in tech news seems to have gotten the memo.
    Reply