AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on X370 Chipset

Update 2023-10-23

Overclocking did not fully solve the stability issue, instead increasing the VSOC and DRAM voltage solved it. For more details see this blog post.

Update 2022-07-20

Others have experienced random reboots with the 5950X CPU. I had one overnight reboot when running a job. Manually overclocking the CPU at 1.1750 V and 44.50 on each CCX seems to solve the issue.

Resources

Introduction

AMD has released support for their 5000 series on the X370 chipset. However, the motherboard manufacturer has to make sure that the BIOS is stable, and we need to make sure that our specific motherboard has support. Thus, confirming compatibility on the manufacturers website is crucial.

The Ryzen 9 5950X has 3.4GHz and 16 cores (32 threads). This will be a significant improvement to my older Ryzen 5 1600 with 3.3GHz and 6 cores (12 threads). Both single core and multicore work will be multiple times faster.

Parts

You can get your motherboard info with sudo dmidecode -t 2 and you can check your BIOS version with sudo dmidecode -s bios-version.

Steps

Upgrading BIOS on Asus Prime X370-Pro

Download the BIOS upgrade

First we download the BIOS 6042 update from Asus website. This is a .zip file with two files in it:

BIOSRenamer.exe renames PRIME-X370-PRO-ASUS-6042.CAP to X370PRO.CAP. However, I skipped this step and used the original name of the .CAP file. I would guess that if you want the motherboard to automatically recognize the USB drive, without you having to point the current BIOS GUI to the file it might be necessary to rename the file. In the manual it also says what to rename the file to, if you want to do that manually on Linux.

Format FAT32 USB

My initial idea was to use the “internet update function” of the Ez flash utility available for the Asus Prime X370-Pro. However, I did not get internet access. The reason might be that I’m using a WiFi card in on my desktop.

In order to flash a USB drive to fat32 and copy the .CAP file to the drive,

sudo umount /dev/sde1
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sde1
sudo fsck /dev/sde1
sudo mount /dev/sde1 /media/usb/
cd /media/usb/
sudo cp ~/Downloads/asus/PRIME-X370-PRO-ASUS-6042.CAP .

Flashing

Have the USB drive plugged in, reboot, press del, navigate to Ez flashing, select the file in the USB drive and flash. When the system reboots the screen will be black for a while and then it says “BIOS is updating”. Running sudo dmidecode -s bios-version now yields 6042.

After flashing

I’ve read reports saying that they’ve had problems with HDMI or booting or similar after flashing the BIOS. Perhaps these reports were from the beta version of the BIOS update. I’ve had no problems at all. After the upgrade it was simply plug and play.

Removing the old cooler and CPU

I had some trouble removing the old CPU cooler from the CPU. Recommendation are to run an CPU intensive job to warm the CPU or use a hairdryer so that the thermal paste gets warm. This did not help, and I ended up removing the cooler with the CPU on. Normally, the CPU should stay in the motherboard socket. Although, everything seems to be working and no pins were bent on the old CPU.

Install the new processor

Placing the new CPU in the socket,

Install the new cooler

Adding thermal paste and placing the cooler,

I have a Fractal Design Meshify C case and everything fit in the case. The only minor adjustment was that I had to place the fan slightly off such that the memory sticks could fit.

Lastly, we’ll have to end with a classic neofetch to show off the setup,

       _,met$$$$$gg.          magnus@euler
    ,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P.       ------------
  ,g$$P"     """Y$$.".        OS: Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid x86_64
 ,$$P'              `$$$.     Kernel: 5.18.0-2-amd64
',$$P       ,ggs.     `$$b:   Uptime: 15 mins
`d$$'     ,$P"'   .    $$$    Packages: 2523 (dpkg)
 $$P      d$'     ,    $$P    Shell: bash 5.1.16
 $$:      $$.   -    ,d$$'    Resolution: 1080x1920, 1920x1080
 $$;      Y$b._   _,d$P'      WM: i3
 Y$$.    `.`"Y$$$$P"'         Theme: Adwaita [GTK3]
 `$$b      "-.__              Icons: Adwaita [GTK3]
  `Y$$                        Terminal: st
   `Y$$.                      Terminal Font: Hack
     `$$b.                    CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (32) @ 3.400GHz
       `Y$$b.                 GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
          `"Y$b._             Memory: 3087MiB / 64220MiB
              `"""