Gigabyte P34G

AFAIK it is listed with the same max TDP as the i7 4700hq = 47w. It is cheaper though.

Mac

 

Just double checked their site, they don't stack discounts.

Another related question: Anyone know if Discover Card's 5% cash back for online shopping applies to any of the popular resellers? That'd be a nice ~$70 to have.

 

Any chance you disassemble the LCD panel too?

 

No- Can't see any screws so I'm not quite sure how it's kept together. Probably with plastic snap-in hook like stuff that breaks very easy.


Mac

 

In my experience the plastic clips holding bezels onto notebooks are almost always far sturdier than they seem.

I still won't be popping mine off if I grab a P34G though.

 

What are people using as a docking station for this beast? I've been eying this one and this one. Are there any that will supply power?

 

What are some of the benefits of using a docking station with it?

 

Were you able to recover your system by disconnecting the CMOS battery and system battery? You mentioned you were missing screws but don't see anything else besides that.

All the best,
Peter

 

For me: I can easily connect two monitors, a keyboard, mouse, and speakers, just using the USB 3.0 port. Way better when I'm working at my desk.

 

Bought a couple of days ago using the BF deal. Added 4GB of RAM for free (confirmed same rates and voltage, but different company), added AC 7460 Intel Wireless Card for $35, added free thermal pasting and Bob's your uncle.

Could not be happier with the specs I'm getting for the money. I hope it performs as well IRL as it does in paper. Hope there's no dead pixels or build issues, this is flying down from America for me with my uncle anyone know if I can ask Gigabyte to ensure the same?

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4

 

Wouldn't connecting monitors pose an issue with HDCP, assuming you're using HDMI or DP connections, as the signal is going through USB first?

Excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject, I haven't used a docking station in over a decade.

 

Delete (Answered my own question and removed to prevent confusion)

 

Man, I totally FUBAR'd my machine. I started messing with the SATA controls and put it in to RAID mode in BIOS, then I clicked on something in the raid setup that I thought might be right, but then I decided to exit without saving because I wasn't sure. KABOOM. Really really hosed. No recovery disks, no disks, have to start from scratch from metal. Luckily my stuff is all backed up, but damn, this sucks. So I was able to install WIN7 on the platter disk because I happen to have a WIN7 disk around, but to do that I needed the INTEL RAID drivers during setup (my WIN7 disk wasn't compatible with the P34G RAID) which I needed to put on a separate USB stick, which I only figured out after hours. After MUCH MUCH wasted time, I got a stable WIN7 Build, got it all updated, got the SSD installed as a smart cache (which was my goal all along!), which was cool and seemed to work well..... Installed all my games, bought some more from the black friday Steam sale.... Then I thought... , I'll update the BIOS while I'm at it. Downloaded the new bios from Gigabyte and BOOM, blew it up again. Won't boot, the windows boot manager is barfing. This time, my Win7 install disk freezes and won't make it to the install screen, so you know, good times.....

Now I'm trying to create a WIN8 install disk, but wouldn't you know, you can't get ISO's anywhere, but there is a an install disk creator from MSFT, which will work if you have the product key..... WhereTF is my Product Key? Any one know?

Also, I think maybe I just need to set which drive is bootable, that might be my only problem, after that I'll try the UEFI boot manager, maybe that will work, after that, I'm going to start from scratch again....

 

Anyone know how to disable the stupid caps lock notification that pops up? It keeps alt-tabbing me from full screen programs... I looked it up and it's supposed to have something to do with Broadcomm bluteooths, but this is an Intel chip so I'm at a loss.

 

A tale of woe! These things happen in the heat of the moment. I suspect you flashed the Win 8 BIOS and thus rendered your Win 7 install non-working. "downgrading" the BIOS should solve this. Probably too late now

Good luck and think twice!

Mac

 

Hey! Good idea! I'll switch to Win7 in the bios and see if that does anything.

BTW. No worries, I've screwed up and rebuilt a computer EXACTLY LIKE THIS every 2 years like clockwork for the last 20 years, maybe more often than that.

But seriously.... How do I find the Windows 8 product key? I don't have the machine in front of me, but my memory of looking at the bottom was that there wasn't a sticker. Is there a product key sticker there? Is it in the BIOS somewhere? Surely I have a license from gigabyte somewhere!

 

Does getting a re-paste with XoticPC or GenTechPC invalidate our Gigabyte warranty? Are we then just dependent on them or are we still eligible for the original warranty as well because they are authorized re sellers?

Long story short, it's not on the outside of the unit but in the BIOS in an area you did not overwrite, it's unique for your system not a generic key. Windows 8 will pick it up automatically.

Peter

 

Just reflash the win7 bios from a boot USB drive. As noted win8 keys are hard-coded into the EFI BIOS.

 

Yes. I was able to recover perfectly fine. Just had to disconnect the main battery as well as the cmos battery.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Glad to hear it . Have you found any of your bios changes in the unlocked bios have had an effect? The only thing I remember you talking about was setting the Temperature Trip Points to higher levels and that not working. Were you able to have actual useful lasting changes to the system via those settings (reduced power consumption, noise, etc..?).

Thanks a lot,
Peter

 

Guys, I cannot play Battlefield 4 on this, the guys from EA told me to configure my graphics card to run nvdia as default and not intel hd. Any idea how to do this? Thanks

 

Open nvidia control panel, go to "3D settings", select "program settings" and make sure BF's .exe is set to run on the nvidia processorr. It should however do it default if the drivers are correctly installed.

Mac

 

hi, after update drivers to 760 nvidia, not is possible change resolution of screen, on Windows is good, but if work to chrome the resolution is poor,

Enviado desde mi HTC One mediante Tapatalk

 

Not sure we get what you mean. If windows is at full resolution (1920x1080) which your screen shot from NVIDIA is not showing, then Chrome runs on the same native resolution. It is possible that you have screen magnification turned way up, use CTRL-'-' to reduce it or CTRL-'+' to increase it. See if that helps.

To change the resolution on Windows you can right-click on the desktop space and the contect menu should give you a possibility to change the resolution. Last thing I would check is that the Intel 4200 graphics card driver is also up to date. Most work you will do with the laptop other than gaming or maybe CAD will be run on the Intel core the rest goes to NVIDIA.

 

What was already suggested will help and I want to assure you this laptop will play BF4 and AC4-Black Flag at full resolution at almost all high settings. In general when NVIDIA relases a new driver they already include most recent games titles to their inclusion list, so not sure why your laptop chose the intel card, unless you may have set the global setting to always use intel over NVIDIA.

Let us know if you figured it out.

 

My p34g wifi sometimes won't connect to the internet and I'll have to reboot it (sometimes more than once) for the internet to be detected. Also today, I tried reinstalling the the 2 wifi drivers from the gigabyte official site, when installing the Realtek Ethernet Controller Driver, I kept getting the blue screen of death --> video dxgkrnl fatal _error, I'm using windows 8, I'm at lost here @_@ any help would be appreciated.

 

Do the fans ramp up during Skype video calls in anyone's experience? This is a major annoyance with my current notebook, though it has really anemic video capabilities to begin with.

 

Hi,
I'm having a problem with the "Smart Manager v3". I seem to be missing some options there, I can't find the "GPU Boost" oder the Performance Option for my CPU. I watched some Youtube videos about the P34G and everyone seems to have these options. Do you have to run WIndows 8 to get the options, I'm currently on Windows 7 64Bit and don't really want to change......
Any tips???

 

I use MSI Afterburner to enable GPU boost in W7-64 and it works great.

 

Oddly enough the smart manager is not listed as driver or utility under the Win7 x64 section of the downloads. Did you use the Win8 version instead? I happened to install Win7 right after I got the laptop a little over a week ago and remember smartmanager working fine, but I never checked if the GPU boost option was enabled or selectable.

I assume that is the version you ended up downloading and installing? If so it may be only a specific Win8/8.1 feature.

 

This review states the CPU is locked at 1.3GHz when on battery. Do you guys see that or did they have their laptop on some weird setting? Review: Gigabyte P34G - Laptop - HEXUS.net - Page 3

Thanks,
Peter

 

Yeah, mine seem to behave that way. It stays at 800mhz and ups to 1300 mhz under load on battery. I seem to recall the GPU/memory frequencies are lower on battery under load too. I haven't tried to use throttlestop or similar tools. On power it mostly seem to stay at 3.2ghz, occasionally up at 3.3ghz under load. This on Win 7 with the 003 BIOS.

EDIT: Just for "fun" to show how the throttling hampers gaming performance. Using the Nvidia Gforce Experience programs suggested graphic settings which are 1920x1080 and a mix of high and low settings - looks fantastic, I get 55-60 FPS on AC and 17-20 FPS on battery in FarCry 3. Changing Power Mode from "Power Saver" to "High Performance" on battery do not seem to affect the clocks. However, the system feels a little more snappy overall on "High Performance". Not really sure what happens.

Mac

 

Just wanted to add a few comments on how my experience is with general use of this laptop - how the system "feels".

If there's any doubt, on AC P34G is an extremely snappy and smooth setup. I added 8gb Samsung DDR3L (M471B1G73QH0-YK0) that have worked fine together with the stock 8gb stick from Transcend (TS1GSK64W6H). At least I have seen no crashes, bluescreens or typical RAM related issues. I also swapped the magnetic 1tb drive with a Samsung 840 EVO 1tb for storage/games and kept the 128gb msata SSD for OS.. My old system is a "13.3 Acer 3820TG with 4gb RAM, an i5-450M, HD5650 and an Intel 320 600gb SSD. Not really a bad system for the money 3.5 years ago.

Besides of my Photoshop and InDesign work I've gamed a lot, testing out various games (actually catching up on a couple of years with little gaming) such as Bioshock Infinite, FarCry 3, Dishonored, CS: Ghost, GRID 2, Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm, Borderlands 2, Diabo 3, The Secret World. The laptop ate 'em all well, with The Secret World being the most "FPS challenged" for some reason, perhaps it is poorly optimized as drastically lowered graphic settings showed little effect. MMOs and some RPGs are often a bit cheesy when it comes to framerates though.

The power of a quad core and loads of memory is obvious when tabbing back and forth between a game and Win while the fast drives make load times snappy. Noticeable in online FPS when the server changes map and you're among the very first to get to the class select screen Large Photoshop and InDesign files are also noticeably easier to work with and the heavy CPU/GPU dependent tasks are much more speedy. However, something as simple as starting up Chrome with my usual 20-something tabs is clearly much faster and with no discernible "system lag" compared to my old system. It just pops right up.

There are some dpi scaling issues with 3rd party software in Win 7 with the 1920x1080 resolution of the panel, but they are mostly possible to work around or to live with. The panel itself is very serviceable with excellent viewing angles. Besides of the color characteristics of this kind of panel (quite saturated with a tendency towards yellows), my "copy" looks uniform in all four corners/towards bezel edge displaying a pure white jpg, edge-to-edge - i.e. no transitions towards yellowing or similar that I can see. Displaying a pure black jpg in the same manner shows very slight light bleeding in some points on each short end. Blacks are good, but not the very best I've seen. Since this is a matte screen, blacks will never be as crisp as on a glossy one. In real life use the panel is pleasing and definitely good quality. Issues with responsiveness of the screen in regards to ghosting is not something I've personally noticed (I'm pretty slow though ). Hardcore gamers with extreme demands might feel different, but I think it will satisfy the other 99.5 %.

It is really quite unbelievable that we can get this kind of performance out of such a small and light package and I'm really happy with this piece off hardware so far. Everything just works and I have found none of those peculiar little issues there tend to be with any pc, OEM or home-built. The only thing that definitely sucks is battery life. I've only gotten around 3.5 from it with no attempts to tweak it for optimal battery life.

Mac

 

im looking into purchasing a gaming laptop. looked into the P34G and also some of the asus and lenovo products. overall is it a good durable quality laptop? looking to also take it to school everyday so it has to be durable. thanks!

 

Thanks M4cr0s, it's good to hear all that . I'm glad it's been working so well for you - I think I can live and be very happy with everything about this machine both for work and play, on the train at a cafe and home - and everywhere in between .

Besides the build quality issues that are variable and exist with anything you buy nowdays, the only thing I am worried about is the noise; if there is a way to prevent it from pulsating and ramping up when I'm just doing office type tasks (e-mail, replying to threads for example). For gaming it seems the stealth mode keeps it pretty steady - just near idle is the problem - then I think this is perfect and I'm ready to get one of my own . Between the NBFC and the Unlocked BIOS I'm very hopeful something can be figured out .

Thank you,
Peter

 

Yeah the laptop is awesome. I had one custom built by XoticPC and I'm very happy about it. Here's my laptop:



My Dragon is real beast!

 

Im worried about the build quality....does anyone know how the international warranty works?
Must we mail the laptop to Taiwan?

thanks

 

I suggest you get it from XoticPC, I live in the Philippines and I honestly had the same concern. The cost to ship it back to the US from here is about $300. I was happy to discover that they do quality checks before sending the unit. So far no fan noise issue and keyboard flex problem for me. I have some rough edges on my wrap but before my order was finalized Xotic explained the issue to me before proceeding. They said it was too risky to open the LCD cover to tuck the wrap inside the casing since the model just released and they hadn't a lot of time to work on it yet. So despite that I'm still very happy that I decided to order from them.

*They also gave me a huge discount on rush build and shipping

 

Thanks Xandmanxx good the to know they do the quality check.
The shipping costs as you said are high, around 300-400 from where I am too.

I found a seller in Indonesia so considering purchasing from them since its closer to where I am.

 

None of us have had this laptop for more than a few months so it's kind of hard to say how it will stand up to long term use, one can only guess. The laptop chassis is a mix between alu and typical durable plastic and quite rigid. It will probably never break with normal use. It is notch or two above most all-plastic midrange to low-end ultraportable laptops, but certainly not Apple build quality. Most of us notice minor aligning issues with the trackpad and keyboard, this does not however automatically mean brittle build quality, just less than perfect fit between external components. My guess is that the screen is the least durable part of the construction. The screen hinges are all metal, but since the screen assembly is very thin there is not a lot of material protecting the panel and the package it will flex and bend with moderate force. Hard knocks and similar at the back can definitely break it (not an uncommon trait for laptops). If carried in the case that comes with it, or any other padded type laptop case in a rucksack with a dedicated laptop pocket it should however be fine but this is not an oldschool IBM "unbreakable" business class ThinkPad that you can throw around as you like.

Worth to keep in mind that the light weight is both a good and bad thing when it comes to durability - it means less impact force in many cases, but also thinner materials. If I where you I would think this through and be honest to yourself regarding your use and typical handling. If you're not sure you'll always be alert and handle it with care you should probably look at other options..

Mac

 

Okay I solved it. It had to do with the Smart Manager Version, my P34g came with Version 3.3, now I'm on 3.4.5 and I have all the options ;-).
The Problem was, that Smart Manager just doesn't show up on the Gigabyte downloads page for Windows 7 64 bit, I had to select Windows 8 as my operating system to see ist, but it runs fine on Win7....
Thanks a lot!

 

Thanks for the info (Smart Manager for W8 running on W7-64)...downloading now...

 

I uninstalled Smartmanager v3.3.6 and installed the Win8 v3.4.5. Yes, it installs fine, but it gave me various issues.

When adjust volume for instance, with the FN+F7/F8 combo or with the jog wheel on my headset I would get thrown back into Win from whatever game I was in. Same thing would happen with for instance an unintended klick on Caps Lock. Annoying! However, absolutely deal breakng was the random key presses. playing an FPS my gun would suddenly start to shoot by itself without me touching any buttons but WASD. That makes for happy teammates This was evident in all the games I tried. Uninstalled v3.4.5 and installed v3.3.6 and it's fine again.

Mac

 

I finally and completely recovered from my FUBAR'd P34G. Went Win7x64 from an old upgrade DVD, got raid going, got the Rapid Storage Technology going, got the BIOS up to date. All in all I wasted a ton of time, but thanks for all your pointers. Now I have a 1TB C:\ drive that seems just as fast as the SSD drive for all intents and purposes by using the Intel RST SSD drive acceleration. I wish I benchmarked it, but in general it feels really good, feels SSD. I have 50GB or so un-partitioned on the SSD that I don't know what to do with, and doesn't really matter.

I started playing FarCry3 to take it for a spin, and it's performing awesomely. Loaded up my regulars (DOTA 2, CIV 5) and bought Europa Universalis IV, Assassin's Creed 3, and the METRO games. I'm sort of pissed that I didn't get the AC4 deal of the day on Tuesday when it was half off, but I don't mind playing games a generation or 2 old.

A few ponderings:
1) Wondering if I should install the realtek audio drivers and dolby again, don't know why, the stock audio drivers work fine but I'm wondering if I'm missing some awesome sauce somewhere.
2) I couldn't find the Gigabyte SmartUpdate on the downloads page. I found that useful, especially since they are spitting out driver updates weekly.
3) I got a PNY USB3.0 drive that isn't being recognized on the USB 3.0 port, even though it works on the USB 2.0 port. Even with the latest USB drivers from GB.
4) I have no idea what I'm going to do when I want to upgrade to the Win8 series, since though I have a hidden keycode somewhere in BIOS, I have no recovery disk, there are no OEM Win8 ISO's on the web that I can find easily. Would GB even be able to help me out without my sending the machine back to them (only to have them re-image the stock build I think)?
5) Note to you all, make your Win8 recovery USB stick and test it out before monkeying with the system. I had data backups, but not the OS.
6) I found that the WiFi in the laptop isn't as strong as my work DELL, nor as strong as my wireless endpoint, so it's not reliable at my desk where the other ones work fine, no worries, I plug the laptop in to my wireless endpoint and it's fine. Still, I'm going to update to the AC card and an AC router for Xmas or shortly after.
7) I'm still amazed at how light and small it is for basically a strong replacement of my old gaming desktop.
8) Will probably upgrade the RAM just for fun too.

 

I think the random mouse clicks has to be caused the palm touching the track pad? I have had a few of those when I was playing BF4....and that usually results in a team kill..... lol

and getting thrown out from the game because of the CAP lock and the volume change are really annoying! anyone got a fix for that? how to disable the on screen display?

Sent from Sony ZL

 

By the power of Greyskull, d'oh and so forth, of course you are right! I have the trackpad more or less permanently disabled as I use a G602 for my "mouse needs", obviously all settings got reverted with the uninstall. After a while I started getting the same thing happening again with v3.3.6 and started suspecting the G602 had started to fail or something (early adopter paranoia).

I hope a smart head has an explanation for the getting-thrown-out-of-games phenomenon though, because that one is certainly not related to the trackpad.

Mac

 

So I'm not the only one getting tabbed out of games when I hit caps lock? That's sort of a relief... I managed to narrow it down to the Smart Manager, since the notifications don't pop up if that's off. Now all we gotta do is figure out how to disable the on screen notifications without disabling the whole manager.

 

You don't need them to do that, just install the proper version of Win8 and it will pick up your unique key from the EFI BIOS.

Besides the noise this is the one concern I have about this - hopefully a solution can be found. Does it only do this behaviour in Windows 7 with the Smart Manager on or also Windows 8 too?

Thanks,
Peter

 

Where do I get the proper version of Win8?

 

Try the application I confirmed in this thread to get your systems unique preinstalled BIOS encoded Windows 8 Key: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...rh71-owners-lounge-n56vz-w-windows-8-a-8.html (or a similiar app, but I know this one works since I got the key from ASUS directly after I contacted their support [because of a listing error I got my laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed a week before it was officially released and wanted to do a fresh install then and they had no idea what to say to me ] - it matched what this spit out at me)

It may or may not work since you uninstalled Windows 8 - but if it works and give you a valid key (which it should) then download here: Upgrade Windows with only a product key - Microsoft Windows Help

And then you can burn the ISO or install from there and you're all set

Peter