MSI has officially announced the release of the AMD AGESA 1.2.0.1 BETA BIOS Firmware for its entire 500-series motherboard portfolio based on the X570, B550, and A520 chipsets. The BIOS firmware addresses a few issues but the two main changes are, support for SAM (Smart Access Memory) on Ryzen 3000 Desktop CPUs and L3 cache performance fix for the Ryzen 5000 CPUs.
MSI Unleashes AMD AGESA 1.2.0.1 BIOS Firmware For Its X570, B550, A520 Motherboards - Addresses L3 Cache Performance Bug on Ryzen 5000 & Adds SAM Support For Ryzen 3000 Desktop CPUs
As we had mentioned before, the AMD AGESA 1.2.0.1 BIOS Firmware was mainly to fix the bugged L3 cache performance for AMD Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPUs. AMD also announced that it will enable Smart Access Memory support for its Ryzen 3000 Desktop CPUs during the Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU launch event and that's being delivered too.
The AGESA 1.2.0.1 BIOS Firmware addresses the L3 cache performance issue that users were facing when updating to 1.2.0.0 BIOS Firmware. For that purpose, a test setup with an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU and an MSI MEG B550 Unify motherboard was used. The test comparison was done with both the AGESA 1.2.0.0 and the latest AGESA 1.2.0.1 firmware. You can see the comparison in L3 Cache performance below:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X L3 Cache Performance on AGESA 1.2.0.0 BIOS Firmware:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X L3 Cache Performance on AGESA 1.2.0.1 BIOS Firmware:
AMD AGESA 1.2.0.1 vs AGESA 1.2.0.0 BIOS Firmware Gaming Performance:
In addition to fixing the L3 Cache performance in AIDA64, the BIOS Firmware also improves gaming performance. We were provided with a benchmark within Shadow of The Tomb Raider where it can be seen that the 1.2.0.1 BIOS Firmware boosts the performance by up to 17% (CPU average).
And lastly, we couldn't forget to mention Smart Access Memory support for AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs. AMD stated that users can expect gains of up to 16% and in the screenshot below, you can see the Ryzen 9 3900XT featuring a Large Memory Range addressable bar when running with the Radeon RX 6800 graphics card. The feature will be supported by all AMD Ryzen 3000 'Matisse' and 'Matisse Refresh' Desktop CPUs.
Following is the entire list of MSI X570, B550, and A520 motherboards that have received the BIOS update:
As always, make sure you get the latest BIOS firmware from MSI's website to ensure the best and most stable performance for your AMD Ryzen 3000 / 5000 series desktop CPU. We will also keep you posted when the noticed AGESA Firmware is around the corner.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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