AMD Ryzen Reportedly Not Offically Supporting Windows 7

One of the nicest rumors to come out for Ryzen was the apparent Windows 7. After Intel started waffling on supporting the aging but still popular OS, many users turned to AMD to be their savior. Thier hopes were further raised when AMD partners confirmed that AM4 motherboards would have drivers for Windows 7. Now a new report out suggests that while Windows 7 may run on Ryzen, it won’t be fully supported.

According to PCWorld who spoke with AMD, the company has tested and validated for both Windows 7 and Windows 10. However, only Windows 10 will receive drivers and support. This is despite the fact that AMD has already fully validated Windows 7 for Ryzen. This means even though Windows 7 will work on Ryzen, there may be certain compatibility issues and if there are any bugs, they won’t be fixed. While some of the blame falls on AMD, the big reason is that Microsoft has ended mainstream support for Windows 7 meaning no more feature updates.

More crucially, it means that some newer features of Ryzen like SMT or load balancing like we saw with Bulldozer which will require a patch won’t be fully supported. We likely won’t know the whole situation until launch and people start trying to run Windows 7 on it. Of course, the motherboard vendors as stated earlier will still be providing Windows 7 drivers for their various components. Hopefully, we will get more clarification on this issue going forward.