Last week when the RX 6800 series graphics cards got released, a feature called SAM (Smart Access Memory) was enabled to select X570 motherboards in combination with a Ryzen 5000 series processor and RDNA2 graphics card.

AMD announced it would support Series 500 only for SAM, however as new BIOS updates roll out based on AGESA v2 1.1.0.0, we now see X470 and B450 supported as well. In very short explaining, the processor with this feature can address the graphics card memory (in full) instead of a block that normally is 256MB. BTW above 4G support has been sitting in your mobo BIOS for a long time now as really it is a standard PCIe feature, but this seems to really take off with the new GPUs as it was never used.

The colleagues from Computerbase report that all current BIOS files for ASRock are supported as well as MSI who distributed the first beta versions to testers, which on the one hand enable Smart Access Memory on X470 and B450 and on the other hand roll out AGESA v2 1.1.8.0 with Curve Optimizer.

ASUS on the other hand also have a series of BEta BIOSes, however ASUS mentions that they do not recommend the use of this BIOS version if a Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) or Ryzen 2000/1000 (Zen) or even an A-series processor (Bristol Ridge) is used. ALso, and quite important, this BIOS update cannot be undone. Once updated, it is not possible to switch back to an older BIOS version in the event of problems.

Version 2406 Beta Version 2020/11/24 10.36 MBytes

PRIME B450M ‑A BIOS  2406

1. Update AMD AM4 AGESA V2 PI 1.1.8.0 for new CPU support
2. It's highly recommended not to update this beta BIOS when using AMD AM4 Socket for AMD Ryzen ™ 3000 Series / 2000 Series / 1000 Series / A ‑ Series Desktop Processors.
3. This beta BIOS can't be reversed.

New AGESA BIOS Updates enables AMD Smart Access Memory functionality for X470 and B450