Agesa bios update enables DDR5 speeds over 8000MT/s on Ryzens

A new Agesa update for AM5 motherboards appears to significantly increase the maximum speed of DDR5 memory. Some testers of the microcode patch beta are reporting speeds of 8000MT/s, even on relatively cheap motherboards.

Several manufacturers have now released a microcode patch for their AMD AM5 motherboards. This concerns Agesa 1.0.0.7b, which includes: ASRock has been released for the X670E Taichi. The higher memory speeds are possible if you decouple the Infinity Fabric speed, designated as FCLK, from the speed of the integrated memory controller: UCLK.

An AMD developer who said he worked on the update for months reports on Reddit that synchronization of those clock speeds with Zen 4 is no longer required for optimal latency. DDR5-6400, which with the new update is still the ceiling for a 1:1 ratio between UCLK and memory speed, works significantly faster with an asynchronous FCLK of 2000MHz than a perfectly divisible 1600MHz, according to him. For higher speeds than DDR5-6400, the UCLK must work in a 1:2 ratio with the actual memory speed, but in some applications the extra bandwidth can still more than outweigh the higher latency that results.

This is still a beta version of the patch, but users are already reporting major improvements in the maximum speeds of DDR5 memory. Such is the case with a Twitter user who on an MSI X670E Ace with the new firmware achieves a speed of almost 8200MT/s with OLOy Hynix A-ram. The well-known memory overclocker Buildzoid picks up an ASRock B650 LiveMixer motherboard a maximum speed of almost 8000MT/s in combination with a Ryzen 9 7900X CPU. ASRock says in proprietary CPU-Z tests achieve a memory speed of 7200MT/s.

In some cases, the speed is achieved on high-end motherboards such as MSI’s MEG ACEs, but in other cases, such as ASRock, it concerns a B650 motherboard that is listed in the Pricewatch for 209.71 euros. With the new bios update, the motherboards should continue to run within the Vsoc limit of 1.3V, but it should be possible to achieve speeds of 7200MT/s even with a Vsoc voltage of 1.2V, according to Asrock’s own screenshots .