PC Processors

[Wazanonymous]

I recently purchased a new Ryzen 9 3950X. I put it on a new AM4 Gigabyte AORUS PRO motherboard and teamed it with 4 x 32GB Kingston Fury Beast (1228GB) DDR4@3200MhZ DIMM. I updated to the latest BIOS (mb_bios_b450-aorus-pro_8a16bg04_f66b) and have had many black screens mostly related to graphics according to the warning LED on the mainboard. I have since rolled back to earlier BIOS (mb_bios_b450-aorus-pro_f62) and am having more luck.
My question to anybody is: "Does the latest BIOS always compensate and allow for older generations of CPU when AGESA updates are released?" Curious to know anybody elses experiences regarding the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X processor and compatibility issues with other hardware and software. Thanks in advance!

[FunkZ · Accepted solution]

The reason to upgrade to the latest BIOS is for an update that you absolutely need. For example, AGESA feature update, support latest processors, higher memory speed, additional NVMe drive support, security hotfix, etc.

Because socket AM4 spanned such a wide range of generations of processors, you will typically find on the older 300 series motherboards there is a cutoff point in the BIOS version history when the original processors like Bristol Ridge are no longer supported due to BIOS microcode size limitation.

Note that for Gigabyte BIOS naming convention, if there is a letter after the number (F66b) it is a beta BIOS release and has not been fully regression tested. It is better to use the last full version (F65) unless the beta BIOS contains an update that you absolutely need. Also for Gigabyte boards there can be revision numbers of the motherboard hardware itself (rev. 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 etc) and occasionally a new version (V2) and BIOS code is not necessarily compatible between these variations. Point being - make sure you download the correct file for your specific revision/version board.

Also make sure to read the BIOS release notes for every version between your current and planned update as there are sometimes prerequisites or extra steps required, for example between F40 and F50 for your board:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B450-AORUS-PRO-rev-10/support#support-dl-bios

[Wazanonymous]

Thanks for the reply @FunkZ. I did take it back to F65 and it is stable now. I believe one of the problems I was experiencing was RAM not getting enough power. After Overclocking the RAM it is stable. This has been an awesome learning experience. At one stage I thought something was broken but after much time in in the bios in the command line I finally got it to go. Using Monica AI, MediCat, and Gparted to set up my RAID0 I finally got it all operating.