AMD's Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) processors aren't officially supported on AMD 300-series motherboards. However, motherboard manufacturers, including Asus and Gigabyte have deployed new firmwares for A320 motherboards to support the Zen 3 chips, some of the best CPUs for gaming that you can buy today.
Some users have gotten Zen 3 to work on X370 motherboards through the usage of bootleg firmwares. The problem with modified firmwares is that there is no guarantee of full system stability, and on many occasions, the firmwares are only available for a select number of models from a certain vendor. Official Zen 3 support on the A320 chipset opens the door for motherboard owners to upgrade to AMD's latest and greatest processors. More importantly, consumers can sleep better at night knowing that they're not running firmware that they downloaded from the Internet that has been altered by unknown entities.
Now that Asus and Gigabyte have released the first firmwares for A320 motherboards, we suspect that other brands will likely follow suit. Whether they have AMD's blessing to do so is another story. We've reached out to the chipmaker to inquire whether the company has changed its stance on Zen 3 and 300-series motherboards.
The AM4 socket is one of the most long-lived sockets on the market that houses multiple generations of AMD processors. A320 motherboards typically come with very limited capacity BIOS chips. Manufacturers have to drop support for some of the older Ryzen parts in order to usher in support for Zen 3. For example, the Asus and Gigabyte removed support for AMDs 7th Generation A-series and Athlon X4 series (Bristol Ridge) processors.
The compromise of not having support for five-year-old processors is one that many A320 owners should be able to live with. Once you go Zen 3, the odds are that you're never looking back.
