NEW Gigabyte P34 V2

A few more things to add about the C404 after using it for awhile.

Battery life seems to take a fairly big dive if PCI Express settings in power options is not set for maximum power savings, this includes while being idle; the power draw at idle will be 10-15% more.

While on battery power the processor is limited to 2.5GHz, but the moment battery life hits 40% it is throttled to 1.3GHz, which is a really bizarre, because it doesn't give any sort of substantial increase to battery life and just impedes performance for even basic tasks such as playing HD video etc.

Interest in this laptop seems to be dropping off in anticipation of the new Nvidia cards, but this information should still be useful for those who might be drawn to the sale Schenker are currently having.

 

What sale--for how much??

 

I'm getting weirdly high temps now after having the laptop for a few months. Just watching youtube videos with the turbo fan setting on I'm getting an average temp of 63C. What should I do? Do a repaste? Return it under warranty?

 

Want to lower your CPU temp by 15 degrees? Check out my latest video on undervolting / underclocking here! Also check out my other videos if you haven't already and if you like what you see, subscribe!

 

Hey sorry, I forgot to mention that I'm running the CPU at 1.7 GHz and a -65 undervolt.

 

A lot of throttle and heat for this one.. I love the thinness, but not at the cost of that.

 

Hi guys i wanted to introduce myself to the forum and mention that I just received my P34G v04 a few days ago (from xotic pc--thank you xotic!) and have had a chance to test it out. I am very pleased with this laptop. The main thing to bear in mind when comparing this laptop to other models, is that it is extremely light and portable and very well designed and built. Its nice to have something so slim and easy to carry. It boots up in seconds.Quality control seems to be good here. There is no issue with fan noise as the fan is very well regulated, for most tasks its is inaudible. Temps on the laptop can get high but there are solutions as I will outline here. My idle temps are 55-58C. Following Sebastian's excellent advice (thank you so much sebastian for your reports and interest in this laptop) I have under clocked two cores to 2.7 and undervolted to -90mv. Prior to this my full load temps were around 88C, now they are around 68-69C. I will be re-pasting this evening and will report back on that. So basically with a few tweaks and thermal re pasting, Its realistic to get 60's C at load on this machine which is very acceptable and in a chassis that is unbelievable light and slim. I will continue to monitor this discussion and add any information I can and answer any questions I can.

Also regarding battery life. Under the power saving mode, with wifi on, 65% brightness,and keyboard back light off,I am getting 5ish hours. I haven't had the laptop long enough to get solid numbers so I will post these as I go

brett


UPDATE:

I have just applied thermal paste (mx 4). Temps under full load are now around 63C. Not sure if there is a curing time for this brand paste but will monitor temps and see if they go down further

 

Is it true that today's laptops don't come with the windows product key sticker anymore? Can anyone who opened his P34G v2 please confirm? I don't want to open mine for nothing.

 

No~ no windows key sticker inside ~ because they are using OEM license

 

Ok thanks.

 

There is a Windows product key sticker stuck to the bottom of my unit.

 

Windows 8 has changed to BIOS embedded for OEM versions. When its time to activate it Windows will know where to look.

 

Which REALLY sucks. This is why there can not exist a universal BIOS unlock; each unlock must be customized for each individual laptop. XoticPC can probably offer that service for a reasonable fee. Of course they'd have to have a disclaimer but I'm sure they'd make some nice $ and have more clients turning to them as they'd be the only retailer to offer this service...

 

So, I watched Sebi97's wonderful videos and successfully undervolted my CPU to -80 mV (haven't tested further yet), helping the temperatures considerably. I only have two questions when it comes to tuning this laptop further - first, is it possible to adjust the CPU fan curve (or manually control the fan) in any way? And secondly, how does one overclock the GPU? I normally use MSI Afterburner on desktop computers, but it doesn't seem to be able to change the parameters of the GTX860M in this laptop. Do you need a custom vBIOS to change even the simplest things? Is there one available?

I also have one reasonably small issue with the build quality of the laptop: the touchpad button seems to be incompletely attached. The left side of it occasionally sticks up to a level slightly above the case itself, creating a small gap. It seems to be poorly/unevenly glued or something. I've attached two pictures to illustrate what I mean (it doesn't always look like that, during normal use it stays fairly level, but always relaxes back to the state in the pictures eventually). Is this common? Is there a way to fix it? I'd normally just send it back straight away, but shipping it back to Germany and getting a replacement will take at least two weeks, so I figured I'd ask here first.

 

Push hard on it while gently wiggling it. It'll snap into place; had similar issue

 

I'm having a weird issue with the GPU temp sensor- some monitoring apps won't pick up my GPU temp and will simply display it as being 0. Specifically I'm referring to MSI Afterburner and HWInfo. The ones that do seem to work proprely are IntelXTU and GPU-Z. Also another weird thing is opening Nvidia GeForce Experience (as in it was already running in tray before opening) somehow makes Afterburner and HWI read the GPU temp correctly (but dropping to 0 once I close GeForce Experience). See below image for example- the times when the graph drops down is when I close GeForce Experience. Running GPU-Z has the exact same effect on both programs for some reason.



And last but not least, strangely these programs display slightly different GPU temps simultaneously. For example when IntelXTU was showing 54C, GPU-Z was showing 49C.



What gives? Is my GPU temp sensor faulty? Did anyone else experience this?

EDIT: Oh btw I also tried RealTemp which also showed 0 temp. For it to show the actual temp I had to go into settings and click the GPU button which pops up a GPU stats window or something (I uninstalled it since then).

 

Also I'm extremely dissapointed with the grainy looks on the screen (first time using matte). I guess I would rather have a reflective screen that doesn't have that awful grainy look. Has anyone considered replacing the display? anyone know of any compatible replacements? and does anyone know where one might find the display manufacturer/model number? do I have to take it apart to find out?

(sorry for double posting)

EDIT: nm got it, model number is AUO113D if anyone's interested (shows in device manager). Can't really find anything useful about replacements on google tho...

 

Everything is fine and working as it should. This is due to the GPU going to "sleep" while not required.

 

Ok got it, thanks. Well in that case I have GPU-Z running on startup to have my temps shown in tray all the time. Does that mean my GPU never goes to sleep? should I not do this?

 

I would advise not doing this... Similar to leaving shadowplay on at all times, it will force GPU to always be awake which WILL reduce battery life. Nvidia should add an option to enable shadowplay only when plugged in but that's another story

 

Ok bye GPU-z lol

 

Not necessarily

Just remove it from start-up programs

 

That's what I did, thanks.

I have another problem though- my laptop keeps freezing and resetting under load. I used your (Sebi's) guide to undervolt my CPU to -90mV (followed to a t). I used IntelXTU's 25 minutes CPU stress test and passed. But I've been playing Far Cry 3 lately and keep getting resets. Naturally I made adjustments 5mV each time, but It's still happening. I'm now at -60mV. I haven't yet tried playing with these settings because I feel even -65mV should be enough to keep me going and wanted a second opinion.

I've been playing on high settings (40-50fps iirc). High performance on battery and fans on auto. My CPU was about 70-75C and GPU was about 60-65C or so when playing. Temperature outside was about 27C (I'm not sure about ambient temp- is there a software that can measure that?). Granted I played about 3 hours (a little less), but this isn't too long to crash this laptop, is it?

EDIT: My computer just froze (no reset) and I was just web surfing I waited about 5 mins and then I reset.

 

You feel this based on what? It doesn't really matter if 99% of all other CPU's can run at -65mV, this neither proves nor disproves what voltage your CPU should run stable at.

Unfortunately every CPU/GPU will be slightly different based on the conditions in the factory at the exact moment it was produced. This means every CPU die will have an individual lower voltage limit, if yours cannot remain stable at -65mV then unfortunately, you will have to move the voltage back closer to stock, or since this is a hardware issue within the CPU, replace the CPU with one that is stable at that voltage.

I haven't played around with mine in a while, but I think it ran into stability issues around -70-75mV so the fact that you are unstable at -65mV does not seem completely out of place.

 

so far i am able to do -90mv with out any issues, I have yet to really push it, although I have played arma3 at high setting for about 30 min with out issues. I dint realize that the chips could vary that much in terms of under/over clock ability. I love this laptop! One thing however is due to th 1080 screen resolution (which looks beautiful btw) things get really tiny. For example when using Photoshop all the tabs are really really small. Without my reading glasses there's no way i could see anything. I was wondering how others are doing with htis

 

Well thankfully so far at -60mV I've experienced no problems. Been playing Crysis 3 as well (high/medium hybrid settings)- temps were CPU 75C and GPU 70C on max fans.

Is that after changing the scaling? I wasn't able to handle the tiny text after doing that as well, simply unreadable. I changed back to original settings- I prefer blurry text to unreadable text. I also contacted Gigabyte about this and asked if there's a fix scheduled for release but apparently their support isn't top notch. See below:

I haven't replied yet. Seems pointless tbh.

 

I do scale at 130% as opoosed to the 150% default. I like this setting. You could try it and see. Its larger but not yet getting blurry. However with regards to applications such as after effects or Photoshop, outlook, word etc...scaling doesn't have any affect and applications will display at 1920 which is pretty small. However I think once I get used to it it will be fine

 

Apparently I need to update my BIOS of my C404 in order to get the fan tweak thing to work. Can anyone guide me on how to update bios? Thanks

Also, whats the best power adapter for the C404? it has a 61whr battery. Would the razer one (150W) one work? The one that comes with the laptop is way too big. Thanks

 

Where did you hear the part of needing to update BIOS for fan tweaks? Im interested in that as well

 

I meant my C404 did not even have fan control options. So i need to update bios in order to get that option on smartmanager

 

Thanks. Text is still a little too small but def better. I'll give it a couple of days.

 

Will Razer charger work with C404 (61whr battery 15.2V I think?)

 

Any news on the gigabyte p34g v3? I can't seem to find anything related to the release date or refresh as someone had stated... So was wondering if someone more knowledgeable than me knew? :/

 

Rumor has it that nvidia is announcing the 900m series on the 1st of October. I hope this is true, I've been holding my horses for way too long now

 

Same. As someone told me it was it was supposed to be out within this week :/

 

900m series has been announced! Sounds like the P35 will be getting one, wouldn't be too surprised if the P34 gets an update soon as well.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M: A Graphical Leap For Gaming Laptops

 

We have the P34 with 970m up on our site

 

You....don't... by any chance.... have an upgrade program do you? xD
Super jealous!

 

Not quite that simple. I doubt the Gigabytes will be found to support swapping GPUs.

 

I meant I swap my p34gv2 I got from you guys for the p34 with 970m and pay difference and whatever other fees xD

 

Also not quite that easy. You can try your hand at talking our service team into doing so for you but would probably be better for you to sell yourself and use those funds to buy the new machine.

 

On you're website and I don't see it listed :/

 

Definitely there... Just pulled it up again myself. I'd PM you the link but you don't have enough posts to allow.

EDIT: JK, you do, had it stuck in my head you need ten posts. PM incoming.

 

Quick question to owners; when set on Auto, do your fans blow evenly while gaming? What version of Smart Manager do you have? Thanks

 

on auto I dont think they are. I choose Turbo mode when playing Arma3 so the fans blow continuously. In this way my max CPU and GPU temps are not going higher than 70c, really nice.

I love this laptop, its amazing how it meets all of my needs so well.

smart manager 3.3.6

 

Nevermind; the source of the problem was some custom fan controller I tried running; all is good now. Thanks anyway. I'm running 4.0.5 and it's great

 

XOTIC please please please do a review on the P34W and P35W as soon as you get them in. I look at your Youtube channel for all the laptop reviews because honestly they're the best all in 1 review of machinery on the net That is all, thank you!

 

I'm sure we will as soon as we get one in to do. The coming months will be seeing a lot of video reviews going up. Hutsady will be a very busy guy getting those made.

 

Are there additional features in 4.0.5 worth upgrading for?

 

No lag when holding down volume button