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Comment by mrilhan | Hacker News Reader

I recently tried to go the AMD/Ryzen route. I like an underdog comeback story as much as the next guy.

But be warned: Motherboards that "support" Ryzen do not in fact support Ryzen out of the box. You have to update the BIOS to support Ryzen. How do you POST without a CPU you ask? Who knows? Magic, possibly.

I still don't understand how AMD expects their customers to have more than one CPU (and possibly DDR4-2133 sticks) to be able to POST and update the BIOS.

I returned everything AMD and went back to safe, good ole Intel. Worked on first try. I'm never getting sucked into AMD hype again.

Also, when I went back to return the AMD components to Fry's, the manager said they were aware/used to getting Ryzen returns because of this.

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What?!

That sounds totally bogus. You don't have to update the BIOS to support Ryzen. Ryzen is the first CPU on AM4.

You don't need "DDR4-2133 sticks". Ever. Any DDR4 sticks can run at 2133, that's literally the DDR4 standard, everything above is overclocking. 2133 rated sticks are the cheapest (and worst).

I got my R7 1700 and mainboard yesterday. Everything worked on first try. Speaking of DDR4, my 2400 rated (Hynix) sticks overclocked to 3200, with decent timings, even :) (Well, decent for Hynix.) My previous system (overclocked non-K Skylake) couldn't run these sticks above 2450.

Why... why would I lie? What could I possibly have to gain from lying about this? I only have HN karma to lose, which I don't have much to begin with.

You can, before simply defending AMD, research and see for yourself that required BIOS updates are indeed an issue.

I tried it with an MSI Tomahawk, and an Asus B350 Prime. Had a Ryzen-5-1600 and a Ryzen-7-1700, as well as a pair of DDR4-2133, and DDR4-3000 modules each, and tried every combination, and was never able to post.

Switched to Intel CPU and Asus Intel-supporting MB with the same DDR4-3000 RAM and POST'd on the first try. I'm saying that to 'prove' that the other components were fine.

I'm glad that it worked out for you, and I wish it had gone smooth for me too.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3387164/am4-motherboa...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/66b7vu/to_all_ryzen_5_...

... so many of these.

You messed up something. My 1700 and Asus B350 Prime were able to POST without issues and without any BIOS updates, and I got both a couple of weeks after release. Most BIOS updates have only been required for overclocking improvements.

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