MSI Announces Intel 600 Series Chipset Support for Raptor Lake CPUs

MSI is the latest motherboard maker to announce Intel 600 series chipset motherboard support for next-generation Intel Core processors. It published a new blog post with a list of what appears to include its entire 600 series motherboards portfolio, spanning products with Z690, B660, H670 and H610 chipsets.

With these updates being prepared (or now available) from most of the big motherboard makers, it looks like the 13th Gen Intel Core (Raptor Lake) family is due in short order. However, it is interesting that MSI (and the other motherboard vendors) haven’t mentioned either the next-gen CPU codename or generational number.

MSI says that these new BIOS updates are available on the respective motherboard pages. The news blog doesn’t link to them individually, but most people will only be downloading one or two BIOS files at the most, so it isn’t a great effort to search MSI support. Some of you will already have a bookmark for your motherboard product/support page.

“Not Suitable for Benchmarking”                   

It is pretty easy for modern MSI motherboard users to apply these updates, once found and saved, using either MSI M-Flash or the Flash BIOS button. However, there is an important line of small-print for would-be early BIOS flashers. MSI writes “Note that the initial BIOS version is for power-up purposes only and is not suitable for performance testing.” This means the newly available ‘next-gen BIOS’ isn’t going to be much more than a curiosity for most users. When Intel gets around to launching its 13th Gen CPUs, there will be an updated “full function” BIOS made available by MSI, so grabbing these files now seems rather pointless.

MSI’s wording regarding the new BIOS not being suitable for benchmarking is very close to what Asus has said. We highlighted this statement about unsuitability for benchmarking in the last paragraph of our story about Intel Core i9-13900K benchmarking using an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard just yesterday.

So, MSI has provided these next-gen updates for its Intel 600 series motherboards, Asus has done the same, and ASRock readied its updates over a fortnight ago. The only major motherboard player not to declare its new/pending updates is Gigabyte/Aorus. We are also waiting for similar news from smaller motherboard players like Biostar, EVGA and NZXT.

Last but not least, Intel has its Innovation event cued up for Sept 27-28, and it wouldn’t be very surprising if some Raptor Lake news was timed to coincide. While you wait, please get up to date by reading through our Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake Specs, Rumored Release Date, Benchmarks, and More feature.