- They said two years of support was enough.
They said, "If you want a new CPU,
you'll have to buy a new motherboard."
ASRock said, "No."
That's right, it started out as a hacky work around,
but on January 12th, 2022,
ASRock rolled out official support
for installing a brand new AMD processor
in a motherboard from four years ago.
Which raises some burning questions,
like if AMD and ASRock can do it, why can't Intel?
And is this one of those situations
where just because you can do something
doesn't mean you should?
It's a situation where I'm gonna tell you about our sponsor,
that's for sure.
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(bright music)
AMD and their partners have done an amazing job
over the last five years or so,
supporting both backward and forward compatibility
between their multiple generations of CPUs
and chip sets on the AM4 socket.
Though, it hasn't been without hiccups.
At its launch in 2016,
AMD promised compatibility for the socket through 2020,
only to pull the rug out from under us
when they announced that their Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 Series chips
would still use them AM4,
but only with the latest X570 and B550 chip sets.
Now, they quickly backpedaled
and added official support for B450 and X470,
but the messaging was, "That's all folks.
We're doing you a favor here.
Don't expect it to get any better."
And yet here we are all the way in 2022,
discovering that their original promise ended up being true.
At least to a point.
Meanwhile, Intel's strategy for over 10 years
has been to release a new socket
almost every other generation like clockwork,
physically breaking compatibility
so there's been no way to challenge their narrative
that we needed a new motherboard every time around.
But then something happened.
A few years ago, socket H4, more commonly known as LGA 1151,
lasted for four whole generations of chips.
But Intel still stuck to their story
that the early boards couldn't run with the later chips
and vice versa.
Now, to be fair,
while the socket and the pin layout itself hadn't changed,
allocation and usage did change.
For Coffee Lake,
which was the third generation of chips on this socket,
some of the previously reserved pins
were reassigned to add power and ground lines
to meet the requirements on beefier six and eight-core CPUs.
That's pretty understandable,
but Intel also relocated the processor detection pin,
breaking compatibility.
They called this socket LG 1151 revision 2
in order to help differentiate.
But stuff like that is a big part
of why so many people find building computers complicated.
It can be scary spending hundreds
or even thousands of dollars on parts,
only to find out that yes, they fit together,
but they don't actually work together.
Unlike our processor hoodie
that goes great with just about anything, lttstore.com.
Practices like these are a big part of why we,
and the majority of the PC industry,
don't advise you to attempt to future-proof your build,
because no matter what you do,
it's only gonna get you so far,
whether it's the next generation of RAM,
PCI Express, or even IO.
How many of you wish you had a USB-C port, for example?
There is simply no way to guess
which investments into better parts will bear fruit
and which ones will end up
having been just a waste of money.
Unless you believed AMD, and ASRock for that matter,
back in 2016 and splurged on this motherboard,
the ASRock X370 Pro 4.
The idea at the time was that if you were a savvy shopper,
you could save a few bucks
by going with an affordable Bristol Ridge Athlon X4 chip,
and then hold off and upgrade later
when either you had some more cash
or you took advantage of one of the best practices,
by trailing the bleeding edge by a generation or so.
So you might've waited until Ryzen 2000 launched
and then snagged a snappier Ryzen 1500X
from someone who was upgrading then.
Man, that is savvy.
Why don't we do some role-play?
I'm you. Boy, the years haven't treated you well.
But they've been a lot less kind
to your poor four-core eight-thread CPU
with its piddly 16 megabytes of level three cache.
Now here's the thing. Remember, I'm you.
I don't wanna download some hacky BIOS
from a Russian forum,
so I'm going to the CPU support section
on my motherboard's download page.
And would you look at that? It's there.
So for just $270 for a 5600X,
that is what my dumb friends will end up paying
for their new Intel motherboard alone.
I'm gonna be on the latest generation.
Freakin' get wrecked.
But there are some catches.
Unlike my friends,
I will not be getting cutting edge features
like PCI Express gen five, or even gen four for that matter.
I'm gonna have to update the BIOS of my motherboard
to piece 7.10,
which removes compatibility for older chips,
which can carry some risk.
And unless I want to invest more money into my machine,
say by upgrading my original DDR4 to something faster,
I might not be getting the most out of my new chip.
So am I actually getting a good deal?
Let's test it out.
Now, short of a power outage occurring
in the middle of BIOS flashing,
you should be okay if you follow along.
We had to get this specific board, the X370 Pro 4,
but on the ASRock forum,
we already found evidence that support is rolling out
to X370 boards more broadly,
and we've heard rumors
that other manufacturers may follow suit.
So all we need is our test bench here,
some peripherals, a USB drive,
and we're gonna have links for all this stuff
in the description down below.
We'll also need an internet connection.
So you're gonna wanna unzip your new BIOS
and drop it onto an otherwise empty FAT32 USB flash drive.
FAT32 is still the default when you format it in Windows
for lower capacity drives, but if you wanna double check,
you can just look in the properties
once your drive is plugged in.
Once you're ready,
restart the system and mash or hold F2 or Delete
to enter the UEFI BIOS.
Now, we're gonna ignore the majority of this
and just go to the Tool tab.
Hey, I get it. That's not funny.
And select Instant Flash and steel yourself,
because once we take this next step,
there is no turning back.
The Bridge BIOS that we're going to use
removes support for Bristol Ridge CPUs
and cannot be unflashed,
at least according to ASRock's website.
So we're gonna do this BIOs, then another one,
and we should be ready for Ryzen 5000.
Oh, and I hope you're ready,
because we've got a video upcoming about GPU shunt modding
that you're gonna wanna be subscribed so you do not miss.
This is gonna take a minute, so.
And reboot. What's that?
- Just hold it. - No, I like mashing it.
I'm a masher.
I wanna make sure that's the correct version.
We actually should've done that before.
"Do you wanna update?" Yes, I do.
Hopefully we have all the...
Secure flash check fail.
Whoa, and it's off.
I mean, I did say this process
wasn't without risk, didn't I?
I looked it up and apparently this can come up
when you're using a thumb drive with too much capacity,
which is exactly why I keep this piece of crap
in my little bag of tricks.
It's a one gig pen drive, completely generic USB 2.
And we're gonna throw the BIOS file on there.
Fatty 32 is what I call this boy.
It's my fatty 32.
Oh, there it is. Yes, it's got it.
Come on, come on, come on, come on,
come on, come on, come on, come on.
Yeah! All right.
Fatty 32 to the rescue.
All right, well, we don't actually wanna boot right now,
'cause we are gonna put a 5600X in...
Ow!
We are gonna put a 5600X in this mamajama.
Okay, come on. Now we're gonna try.
It's gonna do its best to defend its socket from us.
Okay. Argh!
- [Andy] Pre-applied thermal paste.
- Yeah, yeah.
Please subset that I am reusing the thermal paste
on the bottom of the heat sink.
If we were doing any kind of comparative thermal analysis,
obviously I would reapply fresh paste, but we're not.
We're just getting it running and this is fine.
Everything's fine. Everything is good.
Here, catch.
No, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna throw it.
Geez, you guys give me no credit around here.
Okay, new CPU installed.
Blah, blah, blah, structure change, blah, blah.
Yes, reset.
And this is where we would lose all of our data.
Why is this on here?
If we had been using...
Was that on my shoulder the whole time?
- [Andy] Yeah.
- Oh, for crying out loud.
I wanted to change to a shirt
you can actually buy on lttstore.com, so I had the thing.
Ah, look at that. Look at that.
It sure didn't go to 3200. It's at 2133.
All right, so we're gonna have to try and re-enable
our DOCP memory profile here.
I don't know what to expect in terms of memory speeds.
Obviously we're getting a much newer memory controller,
but I also know that motherboard manufacturers
have learned a heck of a lot
about optimal memory trace layouts for Ryzen
in the last four years.
So maybe this will just (clicks) go
and maybe it'll go.
I don't know.
And remember, you can't have success without succ.
Sorry, I've been in a bit of a mood today.
I swear I'm fine.
And there we go. Right to 3200, no complaints whatsoever.
We haven't done any stability testing or anything,
but that's definitely a good sign.
Pew pew pew, pew pew pew. Melee, melee.
I don't know how to melee in this game.
Oh yeah, you gotta switch to knife, okay.
I'm gonna get them. I'm gonna get them.
Pew pew, pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew pew.
Pew pew pew pew.
Oh no, I got beat by a bot!
But that's okay because the 5600X
in our ancient X370 motherboard
did not get beat by an X570 board.
That's right. Where'd it go?
Where's my X570 board? Ah, there it is over there.
Okay, technically, technically,
we came out behind our X570 board
by about 15 FPS in CS:GO,
but we're talking the difference
between 545 frames per second and 560,
so it's not exactly a big deal.
Crazily enough, we actually came out ahead in "F1 2020."
So not only is our ancient board not causing any problems
with a pretty powerful graphics card, an RTX 2080 Super,
our PCI Express gen three bottleneck
isn't causing any bottlenecks for us at all.
Again, I can't speak to the future,
but come on guys, do you want more future out of this?
It's doing pretty well.
It all just goes to show you
that sometimes trusting a company's promise
of years of support
and spending a little bit more actually can pay off.
At least one time it's happened.
We did still obviously need to buy a new CPU,
but we can keep the rest of our system exactly as it is
and get a massive uplift in performance
with significantly higher boosting capabilities,
twice the level three cache to our 1500X,
not to mention two more cores.
Now over on the Intel side of things,
LGA 1200 was just put out to pasture
after just two processor generations
and LGA 1700 has just launched.
And I don't think we've heard any kind of commitment
to long-term support for that socket,
but the same is actually true on the AMD side of things.
Officially, they haven't committed
to any kind of long-term date
for their upcoming PCI Express gen five and DDR5 platform.
But based on the success that AMD has had with AM4,
I think consumers have signaled
that longevity is something that they want to see more of
and I think the entire industry could do better.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
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