AMD finally fixes USB bugs with Ryzen CPUs – but patch won’t roll out for a while yet
New firmware should arrive in April
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AMDhas announced that it has found a solution for thenasty USB connectivity problemswhich have been affecting the owners of someRyzen CPUs.
These gremlins were causing some serious trouble for both Ryzen 3000 and 5000 processors housed in 500- or 400-series motherboards, going by reports, and they were intermittently breaking connectivity with various USB devices.
Giving us news of the fix onReddit, AMD said that with the help of the community and bug reports, “we believe we have isolated the root cause and developed a solution that addresses a range of reported symptoms, including (but not limited to): USB port dropout, USB 2.0 audio crackling (e.g. DAC/AMP combos), and USB/PCIe Gen 4 exclusion.”
AMD has concocted new firmware (AGESA 1.2.0.2) for motherboards which will go out to manufacturers in approximately a week. Those motherboard makers will then need to incorporate that into a fresh BIOS version, and test it, subsequently making that BIOS available to download for affected users.
That obviously means that the solution isn’t imminent for Ryzen owners, but we have a current timeframe of beta testing for the fix-toting BIOS versions to kick off in early April.
Fingers crossed
The caveats, then, are that the finalized versions probably won’t pitch up until later in April, or even May – exactly when it will arrive depends on what model of board you have, and how fast your motherboard vendor is to work through the deployment process. And of course, we have to hope that the fix works across the board, so to speak.
AMD does note that: “If you continue to experience intermittent USB connectivity issues after updating your system to AGESA 1.2.0.2, we encourage you to download the standalone AMD Bug Report Tool and open a ticket with AMD Customer Support.”
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While AMD mentions pinning down the root cause of the bug, what’s notably missing here is any (even vague) indication of what that might be; so we’re left guessing on that front.
As we’ve reported before, folks have been witnessing dropouts of connections with peripherals like keyboards, and indeed problems withVR headsets, or external drives plugged in via USB.
Obviously it’s good that a fix has been discovered and is now inbound, but affected Ryzen owners have been waiting some time for this. AMD acknowledged the problem withits CPUsin February, but users have been reporting issues with USB connectivity since December 2020.
ViaTom’s Hardware
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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