Lenovo Legion gaming laptops hit by major BIOS fail

techradar.com:

Lenovo gaming laptop owners have run into trouble in some reported cases due to a freshly released BIOS update which went live in April.

Since it was rolled out a month ago, more and more folks have been updating to the BIOS version ‘GKCN53WW’, and there have been growing amounts of complaints on various online forums (including Lenovo’s own platform) around serious issues which have been encountered post-upgrade. Windows Latest, which spotted this, observes that the problems mostly affect Lenovo Legion gaming laptops.

The nastiness caused by the BIOS update in some cases includes the likes of Blue Screen of Death crashes with the error ‘DEVICE_POWER_STATE_FAILURE’ (or a driver power failure) or even boot failure, and freezing during game sessions, along with frame rates dropping badly at times.

One Reddit denizen posted: “I installed this on a Legion 7 16ACHg6 I’ve had for 7 months. After playing games for 10 min or so the laptop severely throttles for a couple of minutes. In terms of performance, it was impossible to ignore. Dropping from 75-140fps in FFXIV online to around 15-20fps.This throttling would repeat every 10 min or so.

“I reverted to GKCN49WW and the problem is gone. Pretty severe bug for a gaming laptop BIOS update pushed as ‘critical.’”

Lenovo does indeed rate this BIOS update as a critical upgrade to install, presumably because it contains fixes for some nasty BIOS vulnerabilities revealed by the laptop maker last month, along with a bunch of tweaking for power-related settings.

First off, we should note that there are folks on these various Reddit (and other) threads who have reported installing the GKCN53WW update without any problems. So, it might just be a relatively small percentage of Legion owners who