New AMD Ryzen Microcode Demoed: Reported 1.9 Percent Gain in Boost Clock

As reported by ComputerBase today, beta BIOSes carrying AMD's AGESA 1.0.0.4 microcode have started to emerge for a few select AsRock and Asus motherboards. As revealed by MSI earlier this month, the new microcode is supposed to bring over 100 improvements  for Ryzen CPU owners. 

The new BIOSes are designed for Ryzen 3000-series processors only, so you shouldn't upgrade your motherboard's firmware unless you own one of these chips. Furthermore, the BIOSes are currently in the beta phase, so there's no guarantee that they will play nicely with your motherboard. They also still employ the SMU firmware 46.53.00, which isn't surprising as beta BIOSes don't typically use the correct SMU. The final BIOSes will likely use a new SMU firmware.

The firmware for ASRock's motherboards is hosted at German retailer JZ Electronic's website. It's surprising to see that some X470, B450 and even X370 motherboards also got in on the early action. In Asus' case, only its X570 motherboards made the cut. 

ComputerBase briefly evaluated the AGESA 1.0.0.4 microcode with a Ryzen 7 3800X processor, ASRock Fatal1ty X470 Gaming K4 mother and 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory with CAS timings of CL14-14-14-34. For its tests, the German publication disabled Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and enabled the memory's XMP profile. The new microcode seemingly helped improve the processor's all-core boost clock a bit. Under the AGESA 1.0.0.3ABBA microcode, ComputerBase's Ryzen 7 3800X ran at 4,245 MHz across all cores. With the AGESA 1.0.0.4 microcode, the octa-core part was able to hit 4,325 MHz, a 1.9% improvement. ComputerBase noted that the single-core boost for the Ryzen 7 3800X remained at 4,550 MHz.

ComputerBase said that it couldn't find the dedicated overclocking menu or 100-plus improvements in the BIOS. Perhaps the new features will only be available for X570 motherboards.