AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs and the corresponding AM5 platform have been out for several months. It still, however, suffers from certain POST and microcode-related bugs that adversely affect the user experience. The long boot times and limited memory overclocking support are two well-known issues reported by users. The former is now being ironed out via BIOS updates, and MSI is the first board partner to roll out the firmware.
In a post on the MSI forum, the AIC explains that a new feature called “Memory Context Restore” has been added to all X670 and B650 boards that reduces boot times by as much as half. As per the vendor, MCR sped up boot times by avoiding the retraining of the memory and was available on AM4 as well.
MSI’s technical team tested the MAG X670E Tomahawk WiFi with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D alongside two 16GB DDR5-6000 (EXPO) modules from Kingston. With the new firmware, the boot time was down to 22 seconds (from 43 seconds on the previous version).