How to Fix Lenovo P1 Gen 7 Screen Flickering

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I bought myself a Lenovo P1 Gen 7 (referral) over the holidays to serve as my mobile coding and gaming workstation. In general I've liked it but I do have a few gripes.

The most annoying issue I've run into is periodic screen flickering which is VERY distracting and totally unacceptable for a machine of this caliber and cost.

In this post I'll share information on why this occurs and the solution I used to solve it.

Lenovo P1 Gen 7 Screen Flickering

This screen flickering issue seems to be a widespread problem across several configurations of the P1 Gen 7. According to several forums it seems to be caused by power contention between the network and screen adapters - so under high network load the screen gets underpowered and starts flickering.

So to fix this we need to lower the power consumption such that both the network and screen adapters get the power they need to function properly.

Note: This information / hypothesis is secondhand so may not be 100% accurate. Based on the solution to this problem it seems this or smth similar is root cause but I'm not a hardware expert so can't say for sure.

How to Fix Screen Flickering

There are a few ways to fix the P1 Gen 7's screen flickering problem and I'm going to list them in the order I would recommend trying them - sorted by the efficacy and ease of implementing the fix.

1. Update your Lenovo / PC drivers

At time of writing there is no Lenovo / PC driver update that fixes the screen flickering issue. However given the widespread problem and frequency of feedback it seems likely that Lenovo will put out a fix in the coming weeks.

So if you're reading this in the future - try this first.

This is the recommended way to fix it because it's easy to do, relies on an "official" / trusted solution from Lenovo, and there's low risk. So update your drivers, restart your PC, and see if that fixes it.

2. Lower power consumption of your wifi adapter

This next fix is the most reliable one - it seems to work for everyone that's tried it so far and I've personally been running this fix for the past few days and it's completely fixed the flickering issue without any degradation in PC performance.

This fix lowers the amount of power being sent to the wifi adapter which in turn seems to eliminate the power contention between the network and screen hardware thus fixing the flickering issue.

To fix this on Windows 11:

Go to Settings - Wifi Settings
Select Hardware Properties
Click More Adapter Options - Edit
Click Configure
Go to Advanced tab
Select Transmit Power
Set Value to Medium (defaults to High)

This setting should work for other Windows versions like Windows 10 but the exact button clicks / setting names may be a little different.

3. Lower Power Consumption of the Screen

There are a few reports that lowering the screen power consumption fixes the problem as well. This makes sense but doesn't have many success reports, is more work, and may cause degradation in display quality so better to try the others first.

Some people report that capping refresh rate to 60hz helps.

Some report that getting a different screen configuration like the IPS 165Hz 2560x1600 500nit model helps but this would require sending it back into Lenovo which is annoying.

I would personally hold off on these until you've tried the other ones.

I still like my P1 Gen 7 and think it's the best portable workstation I've owned but it does have its drawbacks. I'm hopeful in the coming months we can smooth those out with Lenovo and make this machine reach its full potential.

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