Gigabyte P34G

I remember someone mentioned how you have to turn off the option of allowing the card to power off when not in used or something, try to look for that in the card's config.

Sent from Sony ZL

 

Setting my P34G up now! Early early first impressions of usage not great. I'm a little annoyed I need to do 8.1 myself, but not shocked, not big deal. So far all I've done besides clean up the desktop is run MS Update and the fans are very loud, far moreso than I had expected (even with all the complaints in the thread). Stealth mode not doing anything, as reported by other owners. Smart Manager seems pretty useful, but auto brightness doesn't seem to do much regardless of the lighting conditions.

This may be a Windows quirk I'm unfamiliar with, but in System Protection in addition to the System Drive, Recovery Partition and Data Drive (D:\) I'm also seeing "(C Missing." Not sure what that's for.

The build quality feels top notch though. Far beyond any other notebook I've owned and definitely above anything I see at work apart from MBPs.

 

The option "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" under the wireless adapter properties/power manager in Device Manager is worth to try out - check, or uncheck. My experience is that when this is unchecked you get issues with wifi coming out of sleep/hibernate. Although frequently quoted in "guides" as a thing to uncheck to get the max out off your wifi, I think this is a misunderstanding. I believe it has nothing to do with wifi performance while the computer is awake and running (most wifi adapters have settings fort transmitting power under the "Advanced" tab), but simply that the computer is allowed power down and restart the adapter in sleep/hibernate.

Worth a try at least. It could also be that you simply have a faulty adapter. I had no issues with the factory single-band 7260 with BT, nor the aftermarked 6300 I installed coming out of sleep/hibernate.

Mac

 

Almost 100% up and running with all my software + data. Something odd happened with Smart Update though (note: I find this software great overall). It prompted me to update from the installed version (1.3.4 I think) to 1.6.5 - and then again to 1.7.5. I understand incremental updates, but it also asked me to uninstall the old version each time, so that can't be it. Why wouldn't it just direct me to the latest version? I ran into a similar issue when updating Smart Manager.

Other than that, I love Smart Update. It works better than any similar vendor specific software I've seen, even Lenovo's which I've always liked.

Also, is it ok to update to Bluetooth driver if I have a different WLAN card (7260 AC)? Afaik the BT transmitter is part of the WLAN card, but I imagine the actual component is the same across all modern Intel devices. Version 3.1.1306.346 is showing up in Smart Update (as opposed to the Wireless Driver being blank).

I was also surprised to see Smart Update prompt me to update my Intel video drivers, as I just downloaded the latest for the HD 4600 from Intel directly. Edit: Actually it says all my Intel related drivers are out of date, but the Intel Driver Update Utility says everything's fine. Hm. Does Gigabyte have customized versions?

 

What is the latest Version of the Smart Manager?


And have you installed the latest Intel ME (management engine) from the Intel website?

Do you know, whether I need the
MEI_Win8.1_1.5M_9.5.15.1730_PV.zip or
MEI_Win8.1_5.0M_9.5.15.1730_PV.zip
?

 

According to Smart Update 1.7.5 the latest Smart Manager is 3.5.0, I haven't touched the IME, IRS or Chipset drivers and would suggest not to until someone with more experience with this laptop weighs in.

 

Would anyone be willing to drop theGigabyte Win8 ISO in a dropbox or something for me privately? I would be forever in your karmic debt.

 

OK. New issue....

Anyone have a problem waking from sleep with an HDMI monitor plugged in to the HDMI port? Mine won't even get to the bios screen, it just starts up, puts a backlight on the screen, spins the fan and then stops there. I pull out the HDMI cable and restart and no problem.

 

Haven't kept track of all the dates and updates on Gigabyte's "Smart Update" utility and I'm now up to 3.1.1311.400 on the bluetooth driver. It's still not right away on reboot (bluetooth mouse and keyboard), but it has gotten much improved. Less than 1 or 2 minutes now on a cold boot. What I do at boot is fire up SmartManager and as soon as I see the bluetooth go "blue" I know I'm good.

Cheers, B

 

Anyone have experience using flux on the p34g? Optimus makes me hesitant to try it.

 

I use it. The only problem is that it lags while changing the flux brightness.

 

Wooohooo! I finally got my machine and absolutely love it. Early opinions are.

The fans do make a noise in general use, but not as loud as I was expecting after reading about it online, maybe I am just not as discerning as some of you guys
There is more screen bleed along the edges than I would like, actually thinking it might be my unit as I am sure it would have been mentioned more if it was like this on everyones. Still it is only noticeable on dark backgrounds, and I am not that fussed, especially considering my last notebook, this beautiful matte HD screen is phenomenal.
The key board is very clicky, but it doesnt bother me and I am not fussed if it bothers those around me
All in all I love this machine. I installed another 8gb ram for a total of 16gb and have run all the updates to drivers and 8.1.

Regarding that. I have moved the recovery to a USB, and using Easus PM have allocated the space to my SSD. Although there is now 117GB available, the actual free space didn't go up! I think I saw something about that on this thread as to deleting something or updating something so that the space is there? Would much appreciate a heads up on what to do. Thanks

All in all this is a great laptop with some issues which to me are minor, especially coming from my old machine. If you are not too much of a purist then this notebook should thrill and enthrall.

I am off now to install photoshop, cinema4d, Sketchup and if my missus lets me, Dead Space 3!

Cheers
Ty

 

Just picked my P34G up over the weekend. Overall I'm pretty pleased - good solid build, plenty of processing power and a really bright vibrant screen.

One tweak that I made was to enable two-finger tap of the mouse pad bringing up the context menu. I saw some discussion of this earlier in the thread and people were talking about installing the Samsung version of the elan driver. This isn't necessary though as detailed in this thread.

As I only wanted to add two-finger tap, I changed the values for HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Elantech/SmartPad/Tap_Two_Finger_Enable and Tap_Two_Finger_ShowItem from 0 to 1.

Now when you access the Elan settings you will have a new option available.


Thanks for all the helpful discussion (all 160 pages of it), it was a great resource in making my decision.

 

please delete

 

Just got my p34g! Loving it, but have a few questions for you all:

1.) When I turn the laptop on, the screen flickers a bit as Windows is loading. After it loads there are no problems, but I am afraid that the flickering is a sign of some kind of bad connection or something. What do you think?

2.) Also, when turning on my laptop, the internet connection does not always automatically connect. I have found if I turn airplane mode on and then off, something is triggered and wifi connects. Is there something I can do to avoid this manual step on start up? I have updated to the latest wifi drivers via smart update, and am at a loss what else I could do.

Thanks!

 

I've had Wifi problems since day one... really annoying and I got the laptop preordered and reviewed it...
Point is it's pretty terrible to have to airplane mode it back and forth to get it find SSIDs but I have to. I guess I could poke gigabyte about it in the new year but don't hold your breath.

 

Hello, I am interested in purchasing this laptop. Let me tell you why. In June, I purchased a Lenovo y500 in June. It had overheating issues, so I took it apart to repaste it, and that screwed up the screen. I ended up selling that one and buying a y510p single graphics model (because I already had the ultra bay gpu). Well, that one never worked in SLI mode because it came as a single gpu model. Well, I sent that laptop to Lenovo, and it came back the same. So, I got a full refund and bought a model from Lenovo with 755m sli. It shines in gaming and battery life, but nothing else. The trackpad goes bizerk. It is almost unusable. It jumps all over the place. I can't even click and drag! I have tried many drivers, settings, etc. Also, this laptop has a glossy display (I was told it was matte) that gives me headaches, and this laptop is also very slow. In addition, it isn't exactly a feather and I'm a college commuter, but I could live with that if the track pad worked. So, I'm thinking about getting this laptop. How is it? 755m sli gives great performance, which I'd miss. 1) Is the 760m good? On A 14" screen I could play in 768p or 900p and have great ppi vs the 1080p on my laptop. 2) I've heard the 760m is very overclockable, and also that the p34g has great cooling. Could I overclock the 760m in the p34g to achieve similar performance to my 755m sli (or 765m) considering I'd be playing at lower resolution than my y510p. I do realize that 40 fps on the 760m is about equal to 50 fps in sli due to micro stuttering and smoothness of a single gpu setup. 3) How are the trackpad and keyboard on the p34g? My current trackpad is an elan and it is absolute garbage, which drives me nuts. Also, how is the hapttic feedback from the keyboard? Is there flex? 4) How is the battery? Can I achieve 3+hrs of wifi and 4+hrs of word processing with shutting off cores and undervolting and underclocking? I could do this on battery to get better life? My y510p can get about 5hr of wifi with the 72 whr battery. Also, is there any way to shut off the charge capacity when plugged in so that I'm not constantly at 100% killing my battery? Lenovo includes software to do that? Does Gigabyte. 5) How is the sound? My Lenovo has GREAT speakers. Are these decent? 6) Finally, how is Gigabyte's support? One of the main reasons I want to get away from Lenovo is their customer service and support. For instance, I had to explain to their technicians that the y510p isn't a tablet...lol

I wouldn't be considering another laptop if the p34g wasn't so thin, light, and sexy, or if mine worked correctly lol. Let me know some of your experiences. I want to get away from Lenovo, but the 755m sli is beastly. Benchmarks put it ahead of the 770m.

 

I'm seriously considering going for this laptop. Compared to Latitudes and Precisions, how do Gigabyte laptops hold up over time?

Any comments/links appreciated.

 

I'm looking for a laptop to place on my mobile platform(robot), and P34G is currently the best choice since I also gonna need CUDA computing. However the throttling on battery issue is holding me at bay for the moment.

With the unlocked BIOS, is there any chance to allow full performance on the CPU? Maybe tuning the CPU TDP would help? Or is there a work-around? I'm just asking for around 10 mins of off-plug testing.

Thanks in advance.

 

Guys, please navigate me towards a guide on how to clone stock 128 ssd to separately bought 256 ssd (preferably using only internal hdd storage).
Also, I have a question on optimizing ssd perfomance (25% spare area thing): how exactly do you do it - creating a 25% partition and deleting it, or some other way?

Thanks in advance.

 

Has anyone had issues with the P34G sleeping/hibernating when it shouldn't?
I have mine set to never sleep or hibernate when plugged in after any amount of idle time and to do nothing when the lid is closed, but when I returned home from work today I found it in a powered down state (not sure which).

My working theory is when it cycles to the battery at 100-95% charge when plugged in that triggers the battery settings, even though it's still plugged into the wall.

 

A question about RAM?
I want to purchase the P34G with 16GB, but can only find it provided with 8. I don't mind getting 16 elsewhere and installing it, but I need to know what type is compatible - can anyone tell me? (or better yet, where to configure it up to 16, for sale to the UK)

 

Hi guys,

tocirahl at the modified-bios thread has postet a guid on how to unlock the BIOS, just wanna let you know. I tried it myself today and it works like a charm!
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gigabyte/738723-gigabyte-p34g-unlocked-bios-2.html
Thanks a lot!

I tried modifying the trigger points for the fan control to make the notebook a bit less noisy. I set the temperature trigger from 55°C to 63°C, but it doesen't seem to make any difference. Looks like the smart manager overwrites these values since the fan ticks in at 45°C on my P34G. Any suggestions ?

 

Macrium Reflect and Easeus Partition Manager are both free. I prefer the former. With both you can resize the partitions as well. I downsized the recovery partition to about 13GB.

 

Any 204 pin DDR III 16000 will do unless you want a higher clock speed. The OEM stick is Transcend, I upgraded with Patriot ones.

 

Hey B'midbar, I see you have a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD in your P34? Could you explain how you did that? Thx!!

 

how did you get that two finger pop-up menu?
i get the two finger-dobbeltapp but not the pop-up menu.

 

how did you get that two finger pop-up menu?
i get the two finger-dobbeltapp but not the pop-up menu.

 

15% off coupon from NewEgg.

Did it immediately (the disk swap w/the 1TB, 5400 RPM HDD) before I started throwing any data out on the drive. Drive swap, memory upgrade and wireless card took me all of 15-20 minutes total. Whole bottom lifts straight off after (I believe) 17 screws. No biggie.

 

Yes. I previously disabled hibernate to get the file space back, but lid down even with high performance power scheme and setting it to not sleep when lid closes, it still does it after some period of time. I think it's SmartManager myself.

 

It turns out this regedit method only works for the current windows session. When you restart windows, the settings revert to their defaults.

I've now installed the Asus Elantech drivers (version 11.5.09) and this gives me all of the touchpad options I was looking for.

 

Not sure if I should be glad it's not just me or alarmed by this. Oh well.

Another question: How does the stock Lite-On drive handle garbage collection and TRIM?

 

Both are handled automatically by Win7 and Win8, only a concern these days when cloning drives, then best to use the new drive manufacturer's utilities.

 

- I got my P34G on December 27th
- Really like it - in every way. Weight, looks (it looks just like a N56VZ mini clone when closed), keyboard feels great (a bit clackity the first time I hit it, but not too annoying). Only thing I don't like is the noise
- The fact I can be just reading a PDF or downloading a driver and it will kick up to very loud fan load bugs me (as I expected)
- I installed the unlocked BIOS first day, changed the thermal break points but didn't help
- I tried changing the settings in Windows 8 from active to passive, but no effect
- Only way I've found that helps is I set my Power Saving processor max to 30% - but even still sometimes I still hit the 52*C trigger which makes the fans spin up for 30-60 seconds. (Even on battery, and even scrolling up and down the Manual PDF for example)
- I really hope we can find a way to change the thermal trip point for fan activation - even if it were 61*C it would eliminate 95% of the idle ramp ups I think and the laptop would be silent unless you are really pushing it
- The person who wanted pics of the N56 next to the P34 I can provide
- The person mentioned about the Wifi turning off on every boot - I had that issue, I used to turn it on and off from the Windows settings each boot, but I found that if I used the hot key one time to do it, it then stayed on. Might be a temp fix, but mentioning it incase.
- There were a couple times I could not connect to my Wifi network (it would give error that it cant connect) but would see the network - turning off and non wifi with shortcut key fixed it - might be temp, Windows 8.1 setup said I needed to reinstall the driver and I have not done so yet.
- Same for bluetooth, I installed the newer bluetooth driver (with the original one when my mouse went to sleep it wouldn't respond unless I turned bluetooth off and on on the computer) and used the keyboard shortcut and it has now been solid - bluetooth keyboard and mouse both work within 5 seconds of Windows 8 start on boot (even before it finished loading).
- I installed my 9.5mm Muskin Chronos 480GB drive no problem, the hard drive assembly seems a little odd as all have commented on, but it seems to hold on well enough. Now have 600GB SSD storage onboard and happy with that. (I didn't need the 1TB, GenTechPC keeping it for $40 was fine with me, I have plenty of such drives and a 2TB USB3.0 I bought last week)
- Currently have a wear level of 4% (down from 15% on first boot as the battery was still being adjusted and hopefully is still calibrating) - currently reporting 4 hours battery life with light typing and 100% brightness with my Power Saving 25% CPU profile).

Hope everyone enjoys theirs and this is helpful in some way to someone - I quite like this laptop . If we can just fix the fan it will be perfect imho.

I will post in the Fan Control thread now with whatever I have tried so far.

Thanks,
Peter

 

congrats, it's nice to hear that your little baby n56 has arrived :thumbsup:

I'm looking forward to see side by side pic between them....

 

Notebook Fan Control Update

I had some time to mess around with the NBFC software. Some things I have fund out..

Key:
[x] = registry offset in Read Write Utility (EC)


[10] - Changing this one from 00 to 01 turns both fans on turbo
[96] & [98] - I believe are temperature readings of the processor in hexadecimal and in Celsius
[100] & [101] - The speed control of the left and right fan respectively. 00 = off, 01 = low, 02 = high, and possibly 03 = higher

Here is a preliminary config file for NBFC. It does not work satisfactory. It works by checking the registries [100] and [101] every 100ms and turns them back to 00 (off). The problem is the fans still turn on for 1 or 2 seconds which turns out to be more annoying than the default settings.

View attachment P34G_v1.0.zip .

I agree with others that finding a way to change the temperature threshold in which the fans turn on is still the best bet. I was hoping I could find a registry which acted as the threshold value but I could not seem to find one.

 

I have got my p34g and I have a problem with vsync in games.
the screen is stuttering when the frames is going over 60fps,
it's fine when running under 60fps. do any have the same problem?

 

That's the nature of vsync my friend.
Nvidia has solved the problem, but it requires a special monitor (and a desktop Kepler card).

 

It's interesting that you are seeing frame rates over 60fps because vsync by definition should be capping your maximum frame rate at 60fps.
In which games are you experiencing issues?
Have you made any changes to the settings (global or game specific) in the NVIDIA Control Panel?

 

I was surprised to learn that mobile Kepler GPUs with Optimus have the adaptive vsync disabled, especially when their product page for the GTX 760M clearly states that it's a feature!

 

I'm talking about GSync, not Adaptive VSync.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7582/nvidia-gsync-review

I may be mistaken about it not being available on mobile Keplers, but I can't find any confirmation either way. I don't see how it could work without Optimus screwing it up though.

EDIT: And of course you'd still need a compatible external monitor.

 

Clearly I didn't read the discussion that closely, last night I finally worked out why I can't connect to (or even see) my 5GHz wifi - the 7260HMW BN is a single band (2.4GHz only) "dual stream" adapter. Shame my router doesn't support 2x2.4GHz streams, there's not many out there that do any more...

 

Ah, hadn't seen that before. Thanks.

 

Can anyone shed some light on this?

 

I think the utility software compares the drivers with the Gigabyte database, not internet drivers ...I have upgraded the drivers with Internet's drivers, and the utility suggests to downgrade for most of them..

 

I've found this with the NVIDIA driver too. Even using non-beta drivers puts me ahead of the GB Smart Update "official" version.

 

Yeah, that's true. What strikes me as odd is the Intel related drivers though (graphics, ime, chipset) all have newer versions listed (with newer version numbers, I mean) as available for download in Smart Update - but not when I run Intel's own driver utility.

 

Hey guys I am running win 7 pro, with the stock SSD, and a 1TB Seagate SSHD (Hybrid...).

Installed: smart mgr 3.4.5, smart update (with the Nvidia & Intel graphic driver issues), Startdock fences, & Nvidia Experience.

I have a lot of games installed on the 2nd drive (1TB) and I have no issues with most of them, but with F1 2013 (and sometimes in Xpand rally), I get FPS lag after 5-10 minutes of play... I will get the lag every few seconds pretty randomly for about 1/2 a sec (sometimes the sound will have a small glitch too when the lag occurs)... mainly in fast speed corner or when I have cars around me on track. I have tried to install game booster, but it made no diff. I have tried to run the game in 1600*900 resolution with video settings to LOW (and vsync and AA off), but it will still do it after a while... same results playing with the few GPU smart mgr settings (boost, ultraboost etc...) the in-game benchmark test is giving me high FPS and recommends I run the game in full HD and high settings... I also tried the lastest NVIDIA driver (BETA posted on their site), which made no diff either... I am checking online and everyone seems to say that this game runs flawlessly at MAX settings on a much less capable system as the P34G, so I am puzzled.

- I am about to uninstall the game and try to reinstall it on the main SSD drive to see if the drive could be the root cause.
- I was also thinking about uninstalling the Realtek sound drivers in case some conflicts exist there...
- Or maybe the Patriot 8GB RAM stick I added doesn't play nice with the stock stick?
- Finally I was going to try to uninstall Smart mgr, Fences, Nvidia experience etc... basically everything running in the background, to see if any of that would make a diff...

Any ideas or input would be very welcome as I am getting really frustrated

Thx!

 

In my case the Intel utility tells me I'm up-to-date and Smart Update isn't disagreeing. How do your version numbers compare?



I don't have a huge amount of faith in the Intel utility, for example it detects the AC 7260 in my system (which I don't have) and that its current driver is version 16.6.0.0 when the version I downloaded from Intel and installed shows up as 16.6.0.8 (as predicted by Smart Update).

 

Here you go, just quick shots:

N56VZ and P34G:





And with my N10J also:




I haven't done any undervolting yet but that is next on my list of things to do. Really enjoying this machine, especially when it is silent. Somehow feels luxurious to me in terms of the texture and especially the touchpad button bar after a year+ with a clickpad.

Except for the noise, I've found this thing to be perfect.

That and it randomly turning off Wifi on resume from sleep/hibernate (happened three times I think) and bluetooth randomly stopping and needing to be restarted (happened twice). Still have not reinstalled since Windows 8.1 upgrade.

I followed a guide on the internet for using a temp key to do a Windows 8.1 upgrade and unforuntaely I lost my actual product key because I did not record it in advance of the upgrade and now the keyfinders just show the temp one. So I used one of my $16.95 Windows 8 Pro upgrade licenses instead. One of the Pro features (such as native RDP in support) will come in handy someday.

Happy New Year,
Peter