hardware 2021 Awards Nomination Thread

The Best of /r/hardware 2021 Awards Nomination Thread
A320 gets official Vermeer (Ryzen 5000) support, B350/X370 remain locked in latest releases
CPUs Could Use 85 Percent Fewer Transistors With New Adaptive Tech
[AHOC] My thoughts on the ASUS Maximus Z690 Hero failures
Capacity Expansion: TSMC Has Begun Planning Beyond 2nm
[Gamers Nexus] Acer Monitor Fires Investigated: Blown Capacitors on Acer XV340CK
VideoCardz: "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU to feature 16Gbps memory and max TGP of 175W"

The Best of /r/hardware 2021 Awards Nomination Thread

Posted: 28 Dec 2021 12:12 AM PST

The year is almost over so it is high time we kick off the Best Of /r/hardware Awards 2021. This is where you decide who wins prizes for posts or comments you liked in the past year.

The winners win awards (will it be a RTX 4090? A CPU Cooler? Or just some dumb Reddit coins? Who knows?) and are immortalised in the /r/hardware sub winner's announcement. Yeah, you could say this is kinda big.

This nomination thread will stay stickied until early next year, when the admins award the coins to give out the awards.

How to vote:

There are 11 categories you can vote for. You can make as many nominations as you'd like.

If you had a nomination but someone else already posted it, just upvote that one and, if you'd like, add your 0.02 as to why you agree with that nomination by posting a comment under theirs. We're going to remove duplicates, so you run the risk of your vote disappearing with the comment.

And this year's Categories are:

Worst Video Review
Worst Article Review
Best User Review (i.e. a review from a Redditor on this subreddit)
Best Video Review
Best Article Review
Most shocking news
Most interesting news
Most Unusual Post
Funniest Post
Best Comment
Worst Comment

submitted by /u/bizude
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A320 gets official Vermeer (Ryzen 5000) support, B350/X370 remain locked in latest releases

Posted: 28 Dec 2021 06:37 AM PST

A320/B350/X370 are finally (a year late) slowly and officially being migrated from AGESA v1 1.0.0.6 to AGESA v2 1.2.0.x. This adds SAM support, USB fixes, security fixes, and most importantly, support for newer generations like Renoir (4xxxG APU), Vermeer (5xxx CPU) and Cezanne (5xxxG APU). Previously you could at most use a 3000 series CPU in these boards.

AGESA v2 1.1.0.0 will boot any Vermeer CPU if used on 300 series chipsets. This is what Asrock used in their experimental BIOSes for B350/X370 in December 2020 that resulted in them getting a warning. This is also what MSI used for the B350 Tomahawk that made the news recently. People crossflash B450/X470 BIOSes with this AGESA base on B350/X370 boards to be able to use 5000 series chips with some caveats of course. (Mostly ASUS boards + Asrock BIOSes, or Gigabyte 400 series on 300 series boards)

Then we got AGESA V2 1.2.x.x BIOSes for B450/X470. These will not boot any Zen3 CPU if crossflashed on 300 series boards. Same BIOS file on a B450/X470 board obviously works as expected. Here we learned of the newly introduced lock / artificial limitations.

AGESA V2 1.2.0.3c for A320 (official release, few weeks old) adds SMU+microcode for Renoir, Vermeer, Cezanne. Renoir and Vermeer boot, Cezanne remains locked. You can run a 5950x if you want on these boards. Wish good luck to the VRMs.

AGESA V2 1.2.0.5 for B350/X370 (official release, Gigabyte only so far) adds SMU+microcode for Renoir, Vermeer, Cezanne. Renoir boots. Vermeer and Cezanne remain locked.

What the hell AMD.

Was A320 a mistake or is this just some sick joke towards the B350/X370 userbase?

submitted by /u/drsaturn_
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CPUs Could Use 85 Percent Fewer Transistors With New Adaptive Tech

Posted: 27 Dec 2021 04:09 PM PST