MSI offers ResizeableBAR support for AMD Ryzen 3000
MSI has just announced that their whole AMD 500 series lineup has now received AGESA 1.2.0.1 BETA BIOS.
The new firmware provides small fixes to SMART reporting and the AIDA64 memory bandwidth test. It also brings support for Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) on older Zen2 CPUs.
Resizable-BAR on AMD Ryzen 3000 series
AMD Zen2 is now officially supporting Smart Access Memory. MSI has provided a screenshot to Wccftech demonstrating the support on Ryzen 9 3900XT CPU. This is a Matisse Refresh CPU released back in July last year. AMD has been reluctant to confirm whether Zen2 could support Resizable BAR, but since Intel announced that their 10th Gen Core released back in April 2020 will support the technology, AMD had no choice but to fast-forward the development for older CPUs.
It is not quite clear if this technology will work for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and all future models featuring ReBAR support. MSI has only tested AMD Radeon RX 6800. NVIDIA only confirmed that their cards will work on the Intel 10th & 11th Gen and AMD Ryzen 5000 series. However, since NVIDIA announcement happened prior to AMD’s announcement of SAM support on Zen2 CPUs, it is very likely that RTX 3060 will also benefit from ReBAR on MSI 500 series motherboards with Ryzen 3000 CPUs.
Resizabale BAR working on AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT and MSI X570 motherboard, Source: Wccftech
AIDA64 L3 Cache fix
Software such as the AIDA64 memory benchmark has been showing lower bandwidth for Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. This has lead people to believe that their CPUs have lower performance. AMD announced that the latest AGESA will fix this specific issue. It is important to note that this will not affect performance in any other software. This was confirmed by Robert Hallock (Director of Technical Marketing at AMD) on Reddit. The fix is only meant to fix the test pattern that was responsible for lower bandwidth reporting by AIDA64.
AIDA64 test pattern fix (pre-left, post-right), Source: Wccftech
MSI also provided a screenshot to Wccftech claiming that the L3 cache fix has improved gaming performance, however, based on Hallock’s comments, it appears to be misleading and incorrect. MSI might have simply mislabeled the chart, it is likely just showing Smart Access Memory performance gain.
List of MSI AMD 500 series motherboards with AGESA 1.2.0.1
Please ignore B5550M-A PRO, it’s a typo.
Source: Wccftech
