News MSI announces 400 series motherboards will support Zen 3 processors

I guess this was caused by the recent "announcement" by Asus. MSI are clarifying in advance, and possibly taking a bit of a pot-shot at the competition at the same time.

From what I've seen of it, it basically boils down to:
1) Person contacts Asus technical support asking if X470 board (Crosshair VII) will work with Zen 3.
2) Asus technical support person has not one iota of a clue, so replies to e-mail saying no, while saying they asked an engineer.
3) Person runs to reddit with "story".
4) Tech media reads this, makes a song and dance about it.
5) Various bits of the internet explode.
6) Asus issues statement attempting to clarify and do some damage control.

The difficulties surrounding PCI-E 3-based and PCI-E 4-based boards, AGESA etc do muddy the waters regarding this, so some confusion is reasonable. However, I thought it was annouced a while ago (May?) that initially only X570 et al would get Zen 3 support day one, while X470 and others would be Jan/Feb 2021...?

The only times I've had any engineer feedback from a technical support query was when they were copied into the e-mail, and provided a nicely detailed expansion to the boilerplate response e-mail. Man, I miss DFI; they really seemed to care. Although I admit I don't miss boards which aren't stable at stock - at least in Linux, Windows XP didn't care as much.

 

MSI actually said this back in 2019 about the MAX boards when they released them.

https://www.msi.com/blog/msis-max-motherboard-lineup

With that line they were promising to cover future AM4 releases or at least getting into a bit of bother if they couldn't I guess.

 

The way MSI have been going about things in the background with partners and with the recent news of them scalping. I won't be buying their products.

Hats off to Gamer Nexus standing up to them too.

 

Yes, I remember. But it blew up again recently (thanks to TechPowerUp/Reddit, I believe...)

...

As for MSI in general; I have bad memories of their kit from way back when they still branded boxes as Micro Star International. I have one MSI board at work right now, and aside from being a temperamental wossname for the first 12 months of its life (settled down after a string of BIOS updates) it hasn't been too bad. I still try to avoid them, though, simply from historical poor experience.

 

Yeah i'd not had the fondest of memories but I have to say I have nothing but praise for my B450.

Can't say it sounds like they've done themselves any favours of late though.