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Riot Games is making an anti-cheat change that could be troublesome on older PCs

    But Riot says it is considering rolling out the BIOS requirement to all players Valorant's highest competitive ranking levels (Ascendant, Immortal and Radiant), where there is more to be gained by working around the anti-cheat software. And Riot anti-cheat analyst Mohamed Al-Sharifi says the same restrictions could be put in place League of Legendseven if they aren't currently. If users are blocked from playing by Vanguard, they will need to download and install the latest BIOS update for their motherboard before they are allowed to launch the game.

    Newer PCs are patched; older PCs may not be

    An AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D in a motherboard with a 500 series chipset. It is unclear whether these older systems need or will receive a patch.


    Credit: Andrew Cunningham

    The vulnerability is known to affect four of the largest PC motherboard manufacturers: ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. All four have released updates for at least some of their newer motherboards, with other boards releasing updates later. According to the vulnerability note, it is unclear whether systems from OEMs such as Dell, Lenovo, Acer or HP are affected.

    ASRock's security bulletin on this issue says it affects Intel boards based on the 500, 600, 700, and 800 series chipsets; MSI only lists the 600 and 700 series chipsets. Asus is also missing the 800 series, but says the vulnerability affects cards based on even older Intel chipsets from the 400 series; Gigabyte, meanwhile, covers Intel chipsets from the 600 through 800 series, but is also the only vendor to list patches for AMD's 600 and 800 series chipsets (basically any motherboard with an AM5 socket).

    Collectively, all of these chipsets include Intel's 10th generation Core processors and newer, and AMD Ryzen 7000 series and newer.

    What's unclear is whether the boards and chipsets not mentioned by each vendor won't get a patch because they don't need a patch, if they're going to be patched but there's just no mention of it, or if they're not getting a patch at all. In any case, the bulletins suggest that Intel 400 and 500 series chipsets and AMD 600 and 800 series chipsets could could be affected, but not all vendors have promised patches for this.