Own an X370 or B350 motherboard? You can now upgrade to AMD's best CPUs

pcgamer.com:

Some motherboard manufacturers have danced with the idea of offering Ryzen 5000-series CPU support on older 300-series motherboards before, such as ASRock offering it on its X370 motherboards. However, you don't need to worry about per-motherboard vendor or per-chipset support from here on, as AMD is officially rolling out Ryzen 5000-series support across all X370 and B350 chipsets with its latest AGESA release, version 1.2.0.7.

What that means is X370 & A320 motherboard owners suddenly have an upgrade path to the latest and greatest AMD Ryzen CPUs. That includes top chips like the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X, which all share the same AM4 socket compatibility as first-generation Ryzen processors—I would suggest some caution in throwing one of these uber high-end chips into a budget motherboard without due consideration first, however.

You're unlikely to access the full performance of your top-end chip, and you'll also be missing newer feature upgrades, such as PCIe 4.0 support.

Though this does open the door to a lot of exciting combinations for gamers on older tech. Say you bought a Ryzen 5 1600 back in 2017 and you're looking to an upgrade. You could now drop in a Ryzen 5 5600X and start gaming without any other major changes to your PC.

The Zen 3 architecture in Ryzen 5000-series CPUs is far better than the one that launched back in 2017. AMD was just getting started with Zen at that time, and while it did begin to change the face of the gaming CPU market it was really Zen 3 where AMD managed to outdo Intel where it counted. 

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMDBest gaming motherboard: The right boardsBest graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaitsBest SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead