Why... why would I lie? What could I possibly have to gain from lying about this? I only have HN karma to lose, which I don't have much to begin with.
You can, before simply defending AMD, research and see for yourself that required BIOS updates are indeed an issue.
I tried it with an MSI Tomahawk, and an Asus B350 Prime.
Had a Ryzen-5-1600 and a Ryzen-7-1700, as well as a pair of DDR4-2133, and DDR4-3000 modules each, and tried every combination, and was never able to post.
Switched to Intel CPU and Asus Intel-supporting MB with the same DDR4-3000 RAM and POST'd on the first try. I'm saying that to 'prove' that the other components were fine.
I'm glad that it worked out for you, and I wish it had gone smooth for me too.
I recently tried to go the AMD/Ryzen route. I like an underdog comeback story as much as the next guy.
But be warned: Motherboards that "support" Ryzen do not in fact support Ryzen out of the box. You have to update the BIOS to support Ryzen. How do you POST without a CPU you ask? Who knows? Magic, possibly.
I still don't understand how AMD expects their customers to have more than one CPU (and possibly DDR4-2133 sticks) to be able to POST and update the BIOS.
I returned everything AMD and went back to safe, good ole Intel. Worked on first try. I'm never getting sucked into AMD hype again.
Also, when I went back to return the AMD components to Fry's, the manager said they were aware/used to getting Ryzen returns because of this.