There have been a lot of discussions on Reddit and other forums over the older Ryzen 3000 processors supporting Smart Access Memory (SAM), otherwise known as Re-Sizable BAR. Technically, it is possible, something the company admitted in a conversation with us, but it isn’t happening, or at least that’s what AMD wants everyone to believe.
Then again, that’s what AMD initially said with respect to supporting the Zen 3 parts on the older B450 and X470 boards. In roughly a week or so though, the decision was reversed. Now, even the paltry A320 motherboards are able to run the Ryzen 5000 chips, unofficially of course.
Basically, we don’t expect AMD to support SAM on the Ryzen 3000 boards anytime soon, but that may change in the future depending on whether it suits the company’s PR goals. It’ll, however, be interesting to see whether the performance benefits are uniform across different generations.
ASUS and ASRock have gone a step ahead and released an update for Intel’s Z490 platform supporting the technology with rather impressive results. At the moment though, only the latest 10th Gen CPUs support it, and we don’t expect that to change, now or otherwise.
- ASRock Follows ASUS in Enabling SAM (Re-sizable BAR) on Intel Platform
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT gets up to 16% Performance Boost w/ SAM on an Intel Platform
