Think of it this way: what was the purpose of the B450 MAX motherboards from MSI if all their B450 motherboards already supported Ryzen 3000 and future support was going to end with Zen 2 anyway? Why go through the hassle of making and marketing new motherboard SKUs if old ones were fine and the feature difference was almost non-existent except for the BIOS chip size?
Answer? Because they knew consumers were looking for value boards to pair with Zen 2, and X570 boards with more expensive components simply did not cut it. And they knew some of them were worried about future support, so they made the BIOS bigger and marketed that as competitive advantage. Both MSI and press outlets literally told their customers B450 MAX boards would support future AMD generations.
Not only that:
1. MSI
outright marketed the boards as Zen 3 compatible. According to HWUB they were also caught off-guard by AMD not providing the AGESA.
2. As you mentioned, the MAX boards were released after x570 (with the claims above) as the
de-facto value chipset for Zen 3.
3. The MAX boards also have exatly the same VRMs and BIOS ROM chips as their entry x570 boards (so no BIOS size limits that x570 also wouldn't have).
I agree that Reddit's reaction is ridiculous, but it's totally fair to point out that AMD could have very easily avoided all this:
1. AMD could have just communicated this waaay fact sooner and all of this fuss would have been avoided.There is no reason why they couldn't do it on x570 launch. The latest it should have done was, when mobo-partners started releasing upgraded B450 claiming to support
all future AM4 processors.
2. Releasing B550 would also have avoided this problem. After al It's released 9 months after Zen 2 and only 4-6 months before Zen 3.
As it stands now at least 3 of my friends have bought B450 MAX boards the last of which was bought in the very end of April
.
The first has it with a used 1700X he got for free, with the intent to upgrade to Zen 3 for cheap in 2021-2022.
The second and third boguht 3600/3600X and planning to upgrade their GPU this year (when Cyberpunk comes) and their CPU in 2021 or 2022 with the best gaming AM4 CPU available on the board at that time. To one of them the chipset fan was something they really hated (and B450 seemed like a perfect way to avoid that).
Now obvioulsy it isn't a huge dealbreaker, they can just buy a new mobo and sell the CPU with the old one, but it's just so stupid that AMD could have avoided all of this confusion with just releasing one slide earlier
.