Updated: There May Be No Zen 2 Support On MSI’s 300-Series AM4 Motherboards

AMD’s desktop processors have long delivered a key feature the competition hasn’t: backwards compatibility. Even with AMD’s old chips that helped drag itself down in the CPU market, newer motherboards didn’t cut out support. Someone with one gen motherboard could probably upgrade to another chip a few generations later without any issue (just a BIOS upgrade). Of course, not all vendors are going to enjoy supporting their motherboards for so long, and we’re starting to get proof of that from MSI.

It’s largely been expected that AMD’s Zen 2-based processors (the 3000-series) would work in current AM4 motherboards – at least X370 and X470. After reaching to MSI, one redditor revealed that Zen 2 support on the 300-series was out. Customer service reps are generally not the best source of forthcoming company actions, but techPowerUp reached out to MSI and was largely told the same thing.

MSI’s 300-series AMD AM4 motherboards may not support Zen 2

You might recall that when Intel released its Coffee Lake 8th-gen Core processors, we were told that 100- and 200-series motherboards would be left in the dark. We were told that the latest chips had beefier electrical needs, and that previous motherboards wouldn’t suffice. We later saw proof of the opposite, albeit with caveats. When you have to jump through hoops to make something work, it’s probably not worth the effort.

MSI claims similar things for Zen 2, saying that previous boards wouldn’t satisfy the electrical requirements. Are we going to revisit this claim months down the road when someone finds out that they can run Zen 2 on 300-series motherboards? We’ll have to wait and see.

The greatest concern here is that MSI may not be the only one holding back support, although if other vendors followed-suit, then it may add some more believability to the claims. Unless those claims are still squashed, down the road. You can never underestimate hardware hackers.

For users of 400-series AMD boards, it looks so far like you’d be safe – so at least there’s that much covered. But of course, things might change. This is a situation we’ll continue to monitor.

April 16 Addendum: MSI reached out to some outlets after this news broke. The company admits that its customer support “misinformed” one of its customers with regards to upcoming support. It’s now correcting the outlook to say that it is planning on supporting Zen 2’s launch with as many of its Ryzen-based AM4 boards as it can.