Does the motherboard support 3000 series AMD CPUs if I update the Motherboard BIOS to the latest one that supports the 5000 series CPUs?

[CasperLaGhost]

I was wondering if I am able to still use the 3000 series CPU on the same motherboard even if I update the BIOS to the latest one which supports the new generation 5000 series CPUs? Cause I heard some rumors about that if the Motherboard BIOS is updated you can only use the new generation CPUs and you can't use the older generations.

[Skiiwee29]

Yes, it will support it. For a full list, your motherboard manufacture should list which CPUs are compatible and which arent with a given BIOS. Older 1st gen CPUs will be the ones cut if space is needed for the BIOS size to fit. 

[SkyeAwoo]

Typically i would not suggest updating your bios unless absolutely necessary. Sometimes the updates pushed out tend to not work well for processors of the lesser generation as I've found out with one of my builds. You should only update if it is absolutely necessary or provides benefits for your actual computer and in most instances if it is not a Ryzen 5000 it will not gain any benefits with these bios updates.

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, CasperLaGhost said:

I was wondering if I am able to still use the 3000 series CPU on the same motherboard even if I update the BIOS to the latest one which supports the new generation 5000 series CPUs? Cause I heard some rumors about that if the Motherboard BIOS is updated you can only use the new generation CPUs and you can't use the older generations.

If the bios chip is too small in capacity, the manufacturer of the motherboard may have to remove support for some of the first processors released on a socket in order to make room in the chip for the code needed to support the new series.

 

The bios release notes will say if support for a series is removed. and there's usually a cpu support list on the motherboard page. 

 

For example, A320 chipset boards often had very small size bios chips, so when Zen+ processors were launched, some motherboards had to remove support for the pre-zen processors (A4-9210c , A6-9220c, A8-7680) and some even removed support for some Zen series processors.

 

 

On socket AM4 there's the first AM4 processors which were mostly sold only to OEMs and were not based on Zen

[CasperLaGhost]

1 hour ago, CookieKittu said:

Typically i would not suggest updating your bios unless absolutely necessary. Sometimes the updates pushed out tend to not work well for processors of the lesser generation as I've found out with one of my builds. You should only update if it is absolutely necessary or provides benefits for your actual computer and in most instances if it is not a Ryzen 5000 it will not gain any benefits with these bios updates.

But doesn't updating BIOS improve stability to ram and the CPU?

[SkyeAwoo]

No it does not. Unless specified it does not do these things it can make them worse sometimes.