NEW Gigabyte P34 V2

Just picked this lappy up on Kijiji yesterday. So far I'm a little disappointed with the 860m. Has anyone released an unlocked bios yet? I know Sebi and Prema were working on one earlier.

 

It's better for everything except user experience.

 

I wonder if you could install a potentiometer to manually adjust the brightness.

 

i love the p34G v2. Everything Im looking for in a laptop. Definitely recommend undervolting to -90 you will get good temps that way. Grab the Codi power brick, and perhaps in future upgrade your battery when it becomes feasible.

 

I take it you're talking about undervolting your CPU? What program did you use? I found disabling turbo boost reduced a lot of sporadic fan noise.

 

I would guess he is using the intel extreme tuning utility

 

yes intel extreme utility. works very well and the P34 G is full open for controlling voltage and clock speeds. i have different setups depending on the work i do. but if i keep the cores to 3.0 and run -90v, with te most demanding tasks i dont usually go over 70 degrees Celsius. however with out undervolting easily can hit 85

 

I played around with the tuning utility all night trying to get the best stable performance to cool ratio. I'm happy to say I'm stable at -85mv with core 3 & 4 downclocked to 2.9, and never past 80c under full load much better than the 91c stock temps.

 

That's incredible! What's your ambient temp?

 

btw, my high temps are with the fan on turbo. Ambient temps with the fan on normal is around 55C. Most of the time the laptop is pretty coool

 

Your ambient temperature is 55c?! Time to invest in a/c

 

I decided to see what happens when I match the the CPU voltage offset, processor cache offset and processor graphics offset to -85mv. To my surprise, I hit max 73c when stressing with xtu!

 

See that's good. Temps at 73 under load is great

 

My 1-day old Gigabyte p34gv2-cf4 is stuck in a BIOS bootloop.

Since it's my day 1 of owning it, I was updating the laptop drivers and then updated to the latest firmware via Gigabyte's SmartUpdate tool. The SmartFlash firmware prompt said the update was successful, and then the computer shut off.

After a minute, I turned the computer back on and it loaded straight into the BIOS. If I exit out of the BIOS, the computer resets (the "Gigabyte" screen comes up) and it puts me right back into the BIOS screen.

I even tried to click F12 for the BBS Boot Selection screen but the only option available is "Enter Setup."

Is there anything that I can do besides contacting Gigabyte? Damn them and their own update tool.

The BIOS and Firmware currently loaded is the "FB05 / F005". I think the previous version was "FA04" (or something along those lines).

Apologies in advance for cross-posting as a main/separate thread, but I am desperate.

 

I'm going through this thread to see what you've all said before, but there's a lot of pages to go through so apologies if these things have been gone over fifty times already.

So I'm a relative computer noob. I've been looking for an smaller sized system (13"-14") with an independent graphics card and through many hours of googling found the P34GV2. It looks good to me (but again, noob), and I had my brother check out the specs as well (significantly less noob, but still not expert), but I have some concerns about the battery life. I'm not a super heavy gamer, the graphics card may be a bit too excessive for my normal needs, but I want to have the power in my machine to run games when I want to.

So to cut to the chase, how long would you estimate the battery life to be during normal computer usage, IE web browsing, MS Word, stuff like that? Specs also have it coming in as under 4 lbs (for 14"), would you say that's accurate?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm still looking at a couple custom build options but for the most part they'd clock in at either the same or higher price point and with lesser graphics and processors since the P34G v2 is currently on sale.

Edit: Another question, if I don't want to upgrade anything is there a benefit to purchasing from HIDevolution (XOTIC doesn't appear to carry it anymore) rather than an online retailer like Tiger Direct? I'm not familiar with either site, but TD has all the original specs for a good chunk of change cheaper which is always a plus.

 

I was able to fix my issue.

• I tried repairing using a Win 8 bootable usb drive. No go. The utility basically said that a repair was not possible.
• I tried fiddling around with most of the BIOS options, including Disabling of Secure Boot. No go.
• FINALLY, what made it work was that disabling Secure Boot opens up an option called "Deleting all Secure Boot Variables" (or something along those lines). I chose this option and rebooted.

Viola. My laptop works again and boots into Windows 8.1 with no issues. I couldn't be happier!

 

I am a new owner of a Gigabyte p34g v2 CF4. However, it seems that my notebook "hiccups" when gaming.

Example: I am playing Team Fortress 2 (pretty lightweight for the 860M) and my framerate is fine. However, the "hiccups" will randomly occur where it skips for half a second or so. This momentary freeze is irritating and has caused me to unnecessarily die in the game.

• I know for a fact that the 860M and NOT the iGPU is being used.
• I've reinstalled with the latest nVidia drivers (352.86), and even downgraded to (350.12). No change.
• When reinstalling, I've tried it with checkmarking the "Clean Install" box and also unchecked it at times. No change.
• I can replicate it on Single Player, so it's NOT a network issue.
• This happens on other games too (including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive).
• My games are all installed on the 1tb secondary hard drive.

Is there anyone who might have a solution to this?

 

Check your event log for any warnings around those times. Are you overclocking at all? Any apps accessing the disk in the background?

Also, TF2 and CS:GO are source engine games. Does it happen with any other game engines? If it's just source engine then try messing with graphics options, especially disabling multi-core rendering.

 

Try installing the game on the SSD. The momentary skip sounds like it could be a loading issue.

 

I saw it as well in several games. Turning the fans to max and making sure the laptop could ventilate well seemed to help.

 

As vinny3 said, it is a loading issue that occurs when the game files are not on the primary hard drive. With few read operations to execute, the operating system decides to spin down the hard drive's disk after a few seconds. The "hiccups" precisely occurs when the game wants to load some data but the hard drive's disk is not rotating. It needs to spin up and it causes a noticeable delay.

The easiest solution is to install your game on the primary hard drive.

 

Well said.

I believe there are also programs you can download that prevent hard drives from winding down, but you'll have to consult Professor google.

 

Got any tool I can use to test this? Either way, I'll try some solutions that prevent the spin down and see if it matters.
The SSD is quite limited in space, and installing games to it will fill it quickly :/



On another matter, any of you had a problem where the screen brightness is stuck?
Using the 'Smart Manager' app or the keyboard shortcut does nothing, and it's stuck on the last level I set.
Last time it took ~4 reboots until it was responsive again... very annoying :/

 

No, I don't have any tool to test this. However, you can actually hear the disk "waking up" when these hiccups occur.

What is the precise scenario that leads to the screen brightness being stuck? I'm also familiar with this issue and it usually occurs when I suspend (or hibernate) the laptop and either plug or unplug the power connector. It happened on my previous laptop as well, so it seems like a Windows 8 or driver related bug. I didn't investigate this.

If a reboot does not fix the issue, I strongly assume that you have the Fast Startup option enabled. Check your power settings in Windows.

Hope this helps.

 

The CPU fan in my P34G v2 makes a lot of noise - I had a look, and the fan blades are rubbing against the fan case.

I've tried bending the cover, which works for a bit, but it always ends up touching the blades again.

Any idea if I can get a new fan online? Or fix it? I am working abroad, so can't get it repaired under warranty easily.

 

IIRC.. replacing the fan requires removal of a sticker attached to a screw that voids the warranty.

 

I am the OP who originally posted about the hiccups (post #1529). I can report that moving the game to the SSD did fix my issue. As XisLoose asked, what is the best tool to prevent the HDD from winding down?

128gb is not a lot of space on the SSD, so I'd like to utilize the storage drive as much as possible -- especially for games that don't require extensive juice (i.e. Team Fortress 2).

 

My Gigabyte p34g v2 has a weird issue where pressing the space bar key at a certain angle causes the back light to turn off. There's also a high pitched whine that occurs when this happens. The "spot" where this occurs most frequently is at the top of the space bar in between the B and N keys.

Here is a video to show you what I'm experiencing:

It's always done this since Day 1. Very annoying issue but not a dealbreaker.

 

Looks like a break in the led line. They are wired in series and, like a line of Christmas lights from the 90s, when you remove one bulb the rest goes out as well.

 

Hi there ,
I have been watching your great videos on youtube before I decided to buy my gigabyte P34 gv2. Well I love it so much, I mean the performance, weight, size etc. I have been using it perfectly till I changed something about bios. I have seen an update on the website of gigabyte and I gave a try to it. My laptop accepted it and works fine, however; It wasn't as much as silence after I upgrade my bios. I mean I was able use my computer silently at office while writing report or surfing on net as a few page open, It was just little noisy while playing gta v. I hear fan working every 5-10 minutes while even reading article on a page or surfing.
I tried to downgrade my bios after searching my old version among many websites but I could find a file and I believe I downgrade it but not sure about that I did correctly.
I have also watched your latest video and the thing what I want to ask, what should I do ? I believe you have experience and many things about P34 gv2.
I thank you for you patience to read my long e mail and looking forward to hearing from you

Take care
See you

 

Has anyone already installed Windows 10 on this laptop?

If so, I would like to know if you noticed any differences in terms of fans activity (and so heat).
I had a bad experience updating my previous laptop from Windows 7 to 8.

Thanks.

 

I just did the upgrade 3 days ago (backed up win 8.1 though). The upgrade went smoothly, 15 min or so.
I didn't notice any difference regarding the heat or fans.

I'll expand in case others are interested.
The default drivers all worked fine, but I updated most of the stuff to the newer version in the "Smart Update".
About the 'Smart Update', the download speeds are horrendous (10kb\s), so I saved the links and downloaded them separately through the browser, much better.
So far, everything seems to work, *except* one problem I had before that seems to be worse now :/
the laptop wakes itself from sleep mode, usually a few minutes after entering sleep mode, and it's annoying as hell.

 

I upgraded at launch, and haven't noticed any difference with fan noise/activity.

 

I upgraded as well. The biggest difference I noticed is the WiFi and Bluetooth being more stable.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

 

Thank you for these helpful feedback. I made the jump and have nothing to report at this time.

 

Well, it seems I can't use the sleep function at all as the laptop wakes up after a few minutes each and every time :/
Anybody else encountered that perhaps?
I'll give the Gigabyte support another try (though they haven't helped before), and revert to 8.1 if nothing helps.

 

When it happens, open an elevated command line prompt ( Windows+X then Command Prompt (Admin)) and type:

Code:

powercfg /lastwake

It will hopefully show what caused this wake up.

If it is a device, find it in the device manager, right click then Properties. There will certainly be a tab called Power Management with an option Allow this device to wake the computer.

 

Cortana is breaking standby on many people's computers

 

Thanks for the help!

I saved the event log from the last 2 times it happened, in both cases I got "Wake Source: Unknown" :/
running "powercfg /devicequery wake_armed" returne "NONE", so no luck there as well.

Any other ideas?

 

As Eason pointed out, try to disable Cortona if you don't use it.

I also found that the Automatic Maintenance service is able to wake up the laptop if necessary; check the associated settings (under Control Panel > System and security > Security and maintenance).

 

Any other wake timers or devices you know of that haven't been disabled? It could be the system synchronizing with the hardware clock (which can be disabled via command line, though I forget the parameters).

 

Upgraded to Windows 10 yesterday. I noticed fans start kicking in during startup (they gradually go up to max). They go back to normal speed when "Welcome" screen appears.

Has anyone else noticed this?

 

Yes it seems to happen when you wake up from hibernation (or similarly if you have Fast Startup enabled and start the laptop).

 

Discovered my first windows 10 bug: no programs or even windows will update. Might have to do a clean install.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

 

has anyone found a suitable sleeve for the P34? the european version does not include the fake leather sleeve... or does someone wants to sell one?

 

I happen to have the original sleeve from Gigabyte that came with my P34W V3 (that I sold lately) - would you be interested in that one ?

 

Man I'm having the same issue.

Even moving games to the SSD it still having the same problem.

Did you find a solution?

 

Hi,

On which games does it happen?

Depending on the game, having your My Documents directory (which includes some game files) on the second hard drive is also likely to produce these hiccups.

 

Dota 2 and CS:GO

Everything is on SSD (Windows, my home folder with documents, Steam etc)

Do you think it is a problem related to games using Source engine?

I don't remember if I had problems using it on Blizzard games. I will try (when my laptop arrives from maintenance... again)

 

I use Case Logic 14" notebook sleeve. It seems to work well, better protection than the stock gigabyte sleeve

http://www.amazon.com/Case-Logic-LAPS-114-14-Inch-Laptop/dp/B004NY9UWI