 They said two years of support was enough. They said, if you want a new CPU, you'll have to buy a new motherboard. ASRock said no. That's right. It started out as a hacky workaround, but on January 12th, 2022, ASRock rolled out official support for installing a brand new AMD processor in a motherboard from four years ago, which raises some burning questions like, if AMD and ASRock can do it, why can't Intel? And is this one of those situations where, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should? It's a situation where I'm gonna tell you about our sponsor. That's for sure. Thanks to Kemp for sponsoring today's video. Kemp develops load balancers that provide maximum reliability for applications in both virtual and cloud deployments, object storage optimization, web application firewalls, and more. Get your free load balancer at freeloadbalancer.com or at the link in the description.<|tr|><|translate|> AMD and their partners have done an amazing job over the last five years or so, supporting both backward and forward compatibility between their multiple generations of CPUs and chipsets on the AM4 socket. Though it hasn't been without hiccups. They went under us when they announced that their Zen3, Ryzen 5000 series chips would still use AM4, but only with the latest X570 and B550 chipsets. Now they quickly backpedaled and added official support for B450 and X470, but the messaging was, that's all folks. We're doing you a favor here. Don't expect it to get any better. And yet, here we are all the way in 2022, discovering that their original promise ended up being true. at least to a point. Meanwhile, Intel strategy for over 10 years has been to release a new socket almost every other generation like clockwork, physically breaking compatibility. So there's been no way to challenge their narrative that we needed a new motherboard every time around. But then something happened. A few years ago, socket H4, more commonly known as LGA 1151, lasted for four whole generations of chips, but Intel still stuck to their story that the early boards couldn't run with the later chips and vice versa. Now to be fair, while the socket and the pin layout itself hadn't changed, allocation and usage did change. For Coffee Lake, which was the third generation of chips on this socket, some of the previously reserved pins were reassigned to add power and ground lines to meet the requirements on beefier six and eight core CPUs. That's pretty understandable. But Intel also relocated the processor detection pin, breaking compatibility. They called this socket LGA 1151 revision two in order to help differentiate. But stuff like that is a big part of why so many people find building computers complicated. It can be scary spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on parts only to find out that yes, they fit together, but they don't actually work together. Unlike our processor hoodie, it goes great with just about anything. Lttstore.com. Practices like these are a big part of why we and the majority of the PC industry don't advise you to attempt to future-proof your build because no matter what you do, it's only gonna get you so far. Whether it's the next generation of RAM, PCI express, or even IO, how many of you wish you had a USB-C port for example, there is simply no way to guess which investments into better parts will bear fruit and which ones will end up having been just a waste of money. Unless you believed AMD and ASRock for that matter back in 2016 and splurged on this motherboard, the ASRock X370 Pro 4. The idea at the time was that if you were a savvy shopper, you could save a few bucks by going with an affordable Bristol Ridge Athlon X4 chip and then hold off an upgrade later when either you had some more cash or you took advantage of one of the best practices by trailing the bleeding edge by a generation or so. So you might've waited until Ryzen 2000 launched and then snagged a snappier Ryzen 1500X from someone who was upgrading then. Man, that is savvy. Why don't we do some role play? Shoo, I'm you. Boy, years haven't treated you well, but they've been a lot less kind to your poor four core eight thread CPU with its piddly 16 megabytes of level three cash. Now here's the thing. Remember, I'm you. I wanna download some hacky bios from a Russian forum. So I'm going to the CPU support section on my motherboard's download page and would you look at that? It's there. So for just $270 for a 5600X, that is what my dumb friends will end up paying for their new Intel motherboard alone. I'm gonna be on the latest generation. Frickin' get wrecked. But there are some catches. Unlike my friends, I will not be getting cutting edge features like PCI express Gen five or even Gen four for that matter. I'm gonna have to update the bios of my motherboard to P 7.10, which removes compatibility for older chips, which can carry some risk. And unless I want to invest more money into my machine, say by upgrading my original DDR4 to something faster, I might not be getting the most out of my new chip. So am I actually getting a good deal? Let's test it out. Now short of a power outage occurring in the middle of bios flashing, you should be okay if you follow along. We had to get this specific board, the X370 Pro 4, but on the ASRock forum, we already found evidence that support is rolling out to X370 boards more broadly. And we've heard rumors that other manufacturers may follow suit. So all we need is our test bench here, some peripherals, a USB drive, and we're gonna have links for all this stuff in the description down below. We'll also need an internet connection. So you're gonna wanna unzip your new bios and drop it onto an otherwise empty FAT32 USB flash drive. FAT32 is still the default when you format in Windows for lower capacity drives, but if you wanna double check, you can just look in the properties once your drive is plugged in. Once you're ready, restart the system and mash or hold F2 or delete to enter the UEFI bios. Now we're gonna ignore the majority of this and just go to the tool tab. Hey, I get it. That's not funny. And select instant flash and steal yourself because once we take this next step, there is no turning back. The bridge bios that we're going to use remove support for Bristol Ridge CPUs and cannot be unflashed, at least according to ASRock's website. So we're gonna do this bios, then another one, and we should be ready for Ryzen 5000. Oh, and I hope you're ready because we've got a video upcoming about GPU shunt modding that you're gonna wanna be subscribed so you do not miss. This is gonna take a minute, so. And reboot. What's that? No, I like mashing it. I'm a masher. Wanna make sure that's the correct version. We actually should have done that before. Do you wanna update? Yes, I do. Hopefully we have all the, secure flash check fail. Whoa, and it's off. I mean, I did see this process wasn't without risk, didn't I? I looked it up and apparently this can come up when you're using a thumb drive with too much capacity, which is exactly why I keep this piece of crap in my little bag of tricks. It's a one gig pen drive, completely generic USB 2, and we're gonna throw the BIOS file on there. Fatty32 is what I call this boy. It's my fatty32. Oh, there it is. Yes, it's got it. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Yeah! All right. Fatty32 to the rescue. All right, well, we don't actually wanna boot right now because we are gonna put a 5600X in. Ow! We are gonna put a 5600X in this mama jamma. Okay, come on. Now we're gonna try. It's gonna do its best to defend its socket from us. Okay. Ah! Pre-apply thermal paste. Yeah, yeah. Plue subset that I am reusing the thermal paste on the bottom of the heat sink. If we were doing any kind of comparative thermal analysis, obviously I would reapply fresh paste, but we're not, we're just getting it running, and this is fine. Everything's fine. Everything is good. Here, catch. No, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna throw it. Geez, you guys give me no credit around here. Okay, new CPU installed. Blah, blah, blah, structure change, and blah, blah, yes. Reset. And this is where we would lose all of our data. Why is this on here? If we had been using, was that on my shoulder the whole time? Yeah. Oh, for crying out loud. I wanted to change to a shirt you can actually buy on lttstore.com, so I had that. Oh, look at that. Look at that. It sure didn't go to 3200. It's at 2133. All right, so we're gonna have to try and re-enable our DOCP memory profile here. I don't know what to expect in terms of memory speeds. Obviously we're getting a much newer memory controller, but I also know that motherboard manufacturers have learned a heck of a lot about optimal memory trace layouts for Ryzen in the last four years. So maybe this'll just go, and maybe it'll go. I don't know. And remember, you can't have success without suck. Sorry, I'm in a bit of a mood today. I swear I'm fine. And there we go. Right to 3200. No complaints whatsoever. We haven't done any stability testing or anything, but that's definitely a good sign. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Melee, melee. I don't know how to melee in this game. Oh yeah, you gotta switch to the knife. Okay. I'm gonna get them. I'm gonna get them. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Oh no, I got beat by a bot. But that's okay, because the 5600X in our ancient X370 motherboard did not get beat by an X570 board. That's right, where'd it go? Where's my X570 board? Ah, there it is over there. Okay. Technically, technically, we came out behind our X570 board by about 15 FPS in CSGO, but we're talking the difference between 545 frames per second and 560. So it's not exactly a big deal. Crazily enough, we actually came out ahead in F1 2020. So not only is our ancient board not causing any problems with a pretty powerful graphics card, an RTX 2080 Super, our PCI express gen three bottleneck isn't causing any bottlenecks for us at all. Again, I can't speak to the future, but come on guys, do you want more future out of this? It's doing pretty well. It all just goes to show you that sometimes trusting a company's promise of years of support and spending a little bit more actually can pay off. At least one time it's happened. We did still obviously need to buy a new CPU, but we can keep the rest of our system exactly as it is and get a massive uplift in performance with significantly higher boosting capabilities, twice the level three cash for a 1500X, not to mention two more cores. Now over on the Intel side of things, LGA 1200 was just put out to pasture after just two processor generations and LGA 1700 has just launched. And I don't think we've heard any kind of commitment to long-term support for that socket, but the same is actually true on the AMD side of things. Officially, they haven't committed to any kind of long-term date for their upcoming PCI Express Gen 5 and DDR5 platform. But based on the success that AMD has had with AM4, I think consumers have signaled that longevity is something that they want to see more of. And I think the entire industry could do better. You know what couldn't be better? This segue to our sponsor. Thanks to Ting Mobile for sponsoring today's video. Ting Mobile has rates that make it easier to see how much you can save by switching. They offer unlimited talk and text for $10, data plans starting at just $15, and their Set 12 plan with 12 gigs of data for $35. They've even got unlimited data for $45 a month. And if you liked their previous pay for what you use plans, they're still there, they're called Ting Mobile's Flex plans and they charge just $5 per gig. Data can even be shared if you have a family plan, so you can connect more devices to save more. You get the same nationwide coverage in the US and award-winning support. In fact, Consumer Reports just named Ting Mobile their number one carrier in America. Pretty much any phone will work with Ting Mobile and they have the perfect plan for anybody. So check them out at linus.ting.com and get $25 in credit. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to check out our AMD versus Intel title fight where we pitted equivalent laptop CPUs against each other. I love how they're going at it lately.