With Patch 14.9, Riot Games recently introduced Vanguard to League of Legends. Originally developed as VALORANT’s anti-cheat, Vanguard requires deeper system access and requires systems to have TPM 2.0 enabled to run. Today, we’ll show you how to check if your PC is ready to play League of Legends, and how to enable TPM if it isn’t.
WHAT IS TPM 2.0?
The Trusted Platform Module, or TPM for short, is a chip that allows Windows to generate and store cryptographic keys to a Microsoft-approved degree of security. In short, this module allows programs to run with a higher trust level than usual. If your system has it disabled, you will see a VAN9001 error when launching League of Legends:
DO I HAVE TPM 2.0?
Not all systems support TPM, so it’s important to check if yours does before continuing with the rest of the instructions in this article.
- Open the start menu by clicking on the icon or pressing the Windows key.
- Type tpm.msc into the search bar and press enter.
One of two things will happen now: You’ll either see an error message stating that “Compatible TPM could not be found” or a TPM Control panel will open up. If the latter is true for you, make sure of the following:
- The “Status” box reads “The TPM is ready for use”
- The Specification Version reads 2.0
If all of those things are true, then your PC should be ready to run League of Legends already. If not, your PC either does not have TPM enabled or does not support it. Now would be a great time to check with your motherboard manufacturer’s support websites to verify that you have a TPM chip.
HOW TO ENABLE TPM
If TPM isn’t enabled on your PC, you’ll need to enter your BIOS to change that setting:
- Restart your PC.
- During the first boot screen, press F2 or Delete to enter your BIOS.
From here, each motherboard will have a slightly different process for changing TPM settings. You may need to exit “EZ Mode” on some motherboards. Generally, it will be located under a tab labeled “Advanced”, “Security” or “Trusted Computing.” The setting itself can also be labeled a number of different things, such as “Security Device”, “Security Device Support”, “TPM State”, “AMD fTPM switch”, “AMD PSP fTPM”, “Intel PTT”, or “Intel Platform Trust Technology.” To make matters even messier, it’s possible that an Intel system has an AMD fTPM chip and vice versa. Once you’ve changed your setting, press F10 to save your changes and reboot your computer. You should be ready to play League of Legends now.
Here’s how we enabled TPM on one of our PCs - your process may vary slightly, so be sure to check with your motherboard manufacturer on the exact location of your TPM settings in your BIOS. The following steps were performed on a GIGABYTE X670E AORUS Master Motherboard.
- Our BIOS opened up in “EZ Mode,” so we had to press F2 to change it to “Advanced Mode.”
2. Once there, we clicked on the “Settings” tab to access TPM settings.
3. In the “Settings” tab, we scrolled down to “Miscellaneous” and pressed enter.
4. Here, we had to enable two different settings. The first of which was the “Trusted Platform Module” selector, which we changed to “Auto”
5. Then, we entered the “Trusted Computing” tab, right below the TPM selector.
6. Finally, we enabled “Security Device Support” and pressed F10 to save and exit.
Once the computer booted back up into Windows, we ran tpm.msc to verify that our changes were successful:
You’ll see that our TPM device is being detected and it has the correct revision of 2.0. As with most BIOS-related articles, we aren’t able to give you definitive instructions for your system as there are thousands of BIOS differences between motherboards, revisions, and chipsets. We recommend checking with your motherboard manufacturer’s support documents before delving into your own BIOS. But, if everything goes well, you should be able to hop into Summoner’s Rift with no issues!
Riot Games provides a helpful support article about Vanguard’s TPM requirement, and Microsoft’s own resource is here.
