Published in PC Hardware

Asus and Gigabyte provide support for Ryzen 5000 series support

by on15 November 2021


A320 users have an upgrade path

Asus and Gigabyte have enabled Ryzen 5000 series support on many of their A320 boards.

According to Toms Hardware, this means A320 users have an upgrade path that could bring large performance gains while skipping the need to buy a new motherboard.

The A320 was a cheap and cheerful chipset with little, if any, VRM cooling and lacking the connectivity and features of B350 and X370 boards. But because Zen architecture was so low power it was possible to run a Ryzen 1700 with a high-end GPU and not lose much performance.

The way to keep the cost of the boards down was to incorporate low capacity BIOS chips. Given the huge number of AM4 CPUs, not all of them can be supported.

This change does mean that the manufacturers appear to have dropped support for Bristol Ridge processors. These are pre-Ryzen AM4 APUs so it’s unlikely that support for them will be missed.

With their strong integrated graphics performance, dropping a Ryzen 5 5600G or Ryzen 7 5700G into an A320 board would provide a big step up for gamers on a budget.

Basically, this means that a gamer on a budget could upgrade to a Ryzen 5000 CPU with 32GB of RAM. Throw in whatever GPU you have laying around and you’ll have a capable little gaming machine.

While many boards even support the Ryzen 9 5950X processor it is probably a bit daring as having a 16-core processor paired with a board with no VRM cooling probably means that you have to have the fire department on speed dial.

Still with a 65W class CPU like rather good Ryzen 5 5600X should be a rather good machine.

Some A320 boards have not added support for Ryzen 5000, so it is important to check the support page for your motherboard to see if there’s a BIOS update that includes 5000 series support.

 

Last modified on 15 November 2021
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