I'm confused about BIOS update for B550 motherboards when using Ryzen 5000 CPUs
Posted by BroccoliFull7675@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 3 comments
I am extremely new to pc building (like, i started research 1 week ago) and I think I want the Ryzen 5 5600 or similar, because it seems decent given my budget. I saw here that I might need to update the BIOS.
I looked it up, and it feels quite similar to something I did a few weeks ago that completely broke my laptop (tried to boot the OS from a recovery drive and failed, paid $50 to have someone fix it because I gave up after spending nearly $100 on USBs).
Can somebody explain what this update thing actually means? I would happily spend extra money to have someone else do it or to buy a motherboard that doesnt need the update, since I have a poor history with booting from drives, unless the process is literally 100% foolproof. I'm normally good with tech, but I have a little ptsd from this apparently.
jasons7394@reddit
There is a chip on your motherboard that has basically a mini operating system that gets the hardware detected, and ready to boot into Windows or Linux, etc..
These chips are programmed with information and if new CPUs are released afterwards, the information for it won't be on the chip.
This will cause the PC to not boot unless you overwrite the BIOS file with a new one from the manufacturer.
First, load into BIOS and check your bios version. Then go to the support page for the motherboard and see if the bios version supports the CPU you want.
If it does you don't need to flash the bios.
HankHippoppopalous@reddit
B550's natively support almost all 5000 gen CPU's
That alert from PCPartPicker is wrong, the only ones that didn't support this were pre-retail sku's
You're fine.
kaje@reddit
B550 was originally released for 3000 series CPUs. Mobos need BIOS updates to support newer CPUs that released after they did, like 5000 series. If you buy a mobo new today though, it will come with a new enough BIOS already installed.