AM4 Motherboards Get Some Well-Needed Updates

[Techstorm970]

Preceding the launch of Ryzen 5, the AM4 motherboards have gotten some well-needed updates to help iron out some of the early bugs.

Article: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3186443/computers/amd-preps-for-ryzen-5s-launch-with-a-helpful-am4-motherboard-update.html

 

The update includes the following changes.

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• “We have reduced DRAM latency by approximately 6ns. This can result in higher performance for latency-sensitive applications.
• We resolved a condition where an unusual FMA3 code sequence could cause a system hang.
• We resolved the “overclock sleep bug” where an incorrect CPU frequency could be reported after resuming from S3 sleep.
• AMD Ryzen Master no longer requires the High-Precision Event Timer (HPET).”

Ryzen performance seems to be impacted by system RAM quite a bit thus far, and so the latency tweak should help to improve performance a little bit.  However, the big deal is the axing of the HPET requirement.

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That last bullet point is especially notable for gamers who want to squeeze more performance out of their Ryzen PCs. Overclocking your system and disabling HPET are two key tricks to maximizing Ryzen PC performance, so having AMD’s own Ryzen Master overclocking software dependent upon HPET was a bit of a bummer. No more!

Hopefully, throwing out Ryzen Master's dependence on HPET will allow us to get better overclocks on our Ryzen CPUs.  While Ryzen's OC potential isn't awful, any way we can squeeze out more performance is welcome.

 

The BIOS updates that will include these changes won't come out for about a week or so, but I'm happy to see that the AM4 platform is finally growing out of its infancy.  To compound this, the article takes note of some upcoming Ryzen optimization updates.

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AMD’s working with developers to optimize performance in PC games. This very morning, Ashes of the Singularity released a beta patch that increases Ryzen performance by roughly a third in PCWorld’s testing. Hot damn. The company’s also inked a multi-game deal with Bethesda—the studio behind Doom, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Prey, and more—to optimize performance on AMD hardware, while “fast changes” to Dota 2 helped Ryzen’s minimum frame rate increase substantially, AMD says.

Sounds good to me!  

[Techicolors]

bit off-topic but when does the ryzen 5 review embargo end? 

[Techstorm970]

1 minute ago, Technicolors said:

bit off-topic but when does the ryzen 5 review embargo end? 

Honestly don't know.  Sorry. 

[Skiiwee29]

4 minutes ago, Technicolors said:

bit off-topic but when does the ryzen 5 review embargo end? 

likely on launch day, April 11th. 

[matrix07012]

When will the support for high speed RAM come? It's kinda needed for Ryzen. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

If it all works, this is good timing: Ryzen 5 is aimed to a broader, less experimental audience, so it is important for the user experience to be smoother (and closer to is potential) from release date. 

[DocSwag]

5 hours ago, matrix07012 said:

When will the support for high speed RAM come? It's kinda needed for Ryzen. 

I don't think we'll ever get 100% certain support for higher clock speed ram, most likely after one point it's up to the IMC.

[Doobeedoo]

Nice. Let's see some very high RAM frequencies now.