Despite AMD stating that there was no support for CPU overclocking on A520 motherboards, it seems that a workaround has been found, at least on Gigabyte A520 motherboards. A video posted by Buildzoid shows that it is possible to overclock a Ryzen 5 3600 on a Gigabyte A520M-H through BCLK tweaking.
As you can see in the video, Buildzoid was able to change the BCLK (CPU clock control in Gigabyte BIOS) from 100.00MHz to 108.00MHz and the CPU clock ratio from 36.00 to 40.50. This bumped the Ryzen 5 3600 to 4389MHz on all of its cores, according to the value listed in CPU-Z.
Buildzoid pointed out that the Gigabyte A520M-H was using the factory F1 firmware. The F2 firmware has already been released, meaning that this loophole might have already been fixed, blocking users from accessing the CPU clock control and ratio settings on the BIOS.
The hardware enthusiast/youtuber thinks the BCLK overclocking is possible because the setting is linked to AMD PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive). This would explain why he had to increase the power limits on the XFR (Extended Frequency Range) tab on the motherboard BIOS.
Technically, other CPUs should also be overclockable through this method on Gigabyte motherboards using the F1 firmware, but due to A520 inferior VRM design and cooling capabilities, it's better to avoid pairing these motherboards with the more power-hungry Ryzen desktop processors.
For now, the only A520 motherboard reported to be capable of CPU overclocking is the Gigabyte A520M-H, but other Gigabyte A520 motherboards should also support BCLK tweaking. No other A520 motherboard from other brand is known to support this feature.
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KitGuru says: If the AMD A520 motherboards supported CPU overclocking, would you choose it over the B550 and X570 ones? Out of the A520 motherboard on the market, which one would you choose for a system?