Following the launch of AMD’s Ryzen processors w/ Radeon Vega last week, some customers have apparently found themselves in a bad spot after building their brand-new rig. It turns out that many AM4 motherboards won’t support these new chips out-of-the-box (not entirely surprising, but a little annoying nonetheless), which means if you choose “poorly”, you may run into a roadblock.
Some motherboards have the ability to flash an EFI even when there’s no CPU is installed, but that feature is typically saved for higher-end boards. So, you can imagine being at home, amped-up to turn on this new PC, only to see a black screen. Your only fix? To get another Ryzen chip that does work in the board, which will then allow you to run your update.
If you have another PC in your house with a Ryzen chip in it, you could move it over to get the job done, although I don’t think anyone would disagree about that being a huge pain in the behind. A second option is to contact the retailer that sold you the board, as they may be able to take it back and update it for you (they do have CPUs handy, after all).
And then there’s another, simpler option, but one that requires a bit of lead time. If you hit up AMD’s support page for this issue, you’ll see mention of a “Boot Kit Solution”. In effect, AMD will mail you an inexpensive Ryzen chip (a dual-core A6-9500, according to Ars Technica) that you can use to get the job done. Afterwards, you can simply ship the chip back to AMD.
Allegedly, the temporary CPU will include a cooler, but it’s not one that’s suitable for Ryzen. Not even AMD wants it back, so you can keep it, but you’re probably not going to find too much use for it.
On a related note, we’re still working on testing out the new Ryzen chips, and hope to have a look at them posted soon. Admittedly, I’ve run into enough issue that it’s slowed progress, but thanks to AMD providing the board seen above, I at least didn’t encounter the issue in this post. More soon.