MSI won’t be blocking Ryzen 3000 support on all older motherboards after all

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One of MSI's support agents recently told a customer that none of the company's X370 or B350 motherboards would support AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series processors (Zen 2), which caused a bit of a brouhaha when word spread. After all, AMD has said from the beginning that its AM4 socket would extend several generations, negating the need to buy a new motherboard with each new round of CPUs. It turns out, however, that the support agent was "misinformed."

After reading the complaints on Reddit and in a few subsequent articles, I reached out to MSI for clarification.

"It has come to our attention that MSI customer support has regrettably misinformed an MSI customer with regards to potential support for next-gen AMD CPUs on the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium motherboard. Through this statement we want to clarify the current situation," MSI said.

"At this point, we are still performing extensive testing on our existing lineup of 300- and 400-series AM4 motherboards to verify potential compatibility for the next-gen AMD Ryzen CPUs. To be clear: Our intention is to offer maximum compatibility for as many MSI products as possible. Towards the launch of the next-gen AMD CPUs, we will release a compatibility list of MSI AM4 motherboards," MSI added.

That still leaves the door open to block Ryzen 3000 series CPUs from working in some X370 and B350 motherboards, though not all of them. And as for the X370 XPower Gaming Titanium specifically, it will in fact support AMD's upcoming CPUs with a BIOS update (E7a31AMS.1M1).

Here is a full list of current and previous generation MSI motherboards that have already been qualified to work with Ryzen 3000:

• X470 Gaming M7 AC
• X470 Gaming Pro Carbon
• X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC
• X470 Gaming Plus
• X470 Gaming Pro
• B450M Bazooka and B450 Bazooka V2
• B450 M Pro-VDH and B450 M Pro VDH V2
• B450M Pro-VDH Plus
• B450I Gaming Plus AC
• B450M Pro-M2 and B450M Pro-M2 V2
• B450M Thunder
• B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC
• B450 Gaming Plus
• B450-A Pro
• B450M Gaming Plus
• B450M Mortar
• B450M Titanium
• B450M Bazooka Plus and B450M Booka Plus V2
• B450M Tomhawk
• X370 XPower Gaming Titanium
• X370 Gaming Pro Carbon
• X370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC
• X370 Gaming Plus
• X370 Gaming Pro
• X370 Krait Gaming
• X370 SLI Plus
• X370 Gaming M7 ACK
• B350 Tomahawk
• B350 PC Mate
• B350 Tomahawk Arctic
• B350 Gaming Plus
• B350M Mortar
• M350M Mortar Arctic
• B350M Bazooka
• B350M Pro-VDH
• B350M Gaming Pro
• B350I Pro AC
• B350 Gaming Pro Carbon
• B350M Pro-VH Plus
• B350 Krait Gaming
• B350 Tomahawk Plus
• Be50M Pro-VD Plus

That's a total of 46 motherboards, split evenly between the current generation X470/B450 and previous generation X370/B350 chipsets. Presumably more will be added to the mix before all is said and done. How many will get left out in the cold, if any, is not yet know.

For those building from the ground up, there will also be new motherboards based on AMD's upcoming X570 chipset. Full details have not yet been announced, though X570 will be the first consumer chipset to support PCI Express 4. That will provide more bandwidth for PCIe devices, such as graphics cards and NVMe solid state drives.