Access HP Envy 14 F.23 BIOS Advanced Options

Enables you to access a myriad of options

Selection of dGPU/iGPU/hybrid

Unlocks Advanced CPU settings:
Intel C-states enable/disable (to reduce CPU whine; may cause higher temps & lower battery life though)
Intel VT and Hyperthreading enable/disable
Intelligent Power Sharing Settings
QPI bus/Memory Speed settings

Temperature/fan kick in selection
IDE/AHCI
Power settings
and many others...

To access, completely power off your Envy.
Press the power button and press F10 followed by A immediately.
You would then see the advanced options in the bios.

*You may need to try a few times to get into the advanced bios.

You may not be able to access the advanced settings if you do a restart instead of a full shutdown & boot-up.

After you have tried, vote for your results in the poll above.

Proceed at your own responsibility.

 

...hmmm....I don't even remember if I'm on the F.23 Bios.

Edit: I'm on F.13. I can access the options.

I am not dumb enough to change anything (but may go back in later when I figure out what each fan temperature option is).


Also I wonder if setting memory to 1333Mhz speed would actually work with an i5 or if that would just make the computer go "oh no you don't"

 

I tried this on f.23, and it didn't work.

Lemme try it again...

 

I can't edit the above post.

Anyhow, OH MY GOD IT WORKS.

 

now don't brick your computer eafd. that would suck.

 

Got it on F.13. Mostly Greek to me, but cool nevertheless. The fan thresholds seem to be the most useful for the lay-user, but mine were already at acceptable levels of 55/70/85/100, so I kept them as they were.

 

I have actually tinkered with the settings - the memory can't be increased to 1333 for i5, but can be downclocked to 800.

The QPI settings wise - originally 2.4GHz - setting it to anything else other than auto increases the DMI?/QPI bus speed to 2.7GHz.

Temperature settings are working. You can tweak HT on/off and decide if you want Turbo Boost on/off - disabling Turbo Boost can cure the LOUD fans as mentioned by other Envy 14 users.

 

changed my temp fan on settings abit.. so loud fans dont kick in unless im gaming with temps in the 80C region.. ill talk it over with magus on his settings he put.

 

been busy, haven't changed things

 

I'm on F.06 and I have all of the above except "Selection of dGPU/iGPU/hybrid". Either it's not there or I haven't found it yet. Could you tell me yhere did you find it?

 

Honestly, if this didn't work with the ones confirmed, then you're doing it wrong.

 

Forcing memory on 1333 doesnt seem to work for me, even though I have 1333 memory on my i5-580.

eafd > you have an i7, so you have 1333 by default

 

Can the 3 people who voted 'no' for F.23 try again. Note that it can take a few times/tries before you may get inside.

 

In F.23, it's under advanced>video configuration>video selection. Not sure about F.06 though.

 

This also unlocks some advanced CPU settings.

We can now disable C-States, which is pretty much the holy grail for those with CPU whine.

 

yup. though doesn't that kill battery life?


hmmm...I have cpu whine (or hdd whine..can't tell). I should test that out eventually.

 

Yeah, I'm noticing about a 10*C rise in overall core temps. So, battery life is likely going down the drain.

Another bright side to disabled C-State is reduced noise on the headphone jack. You'll also notice less HDD noises.

 

Ahh..

I am one of those three and I finally got it to work!

I finally got it to work once I tried hitting F10 and A at the same time on the HP splash screen. Perhaps you can add that tidbit in your first post as well as update the CPU whine and fan noise threads. We now have the ability to tweak the fan temp settings to not activate so readily and/or decrease the level of cycling.

P.S. Also, you may want to emphasize in your first post that a person can't access the advanced settings if you do a restart instead of a full shutdown & boot-up. I see that you mentioned that one has to do a full shutdown but I didn't think it would make a difference if I just restarted and did the combo. However, I haven't tried to access the menu after a restart now that I figured out how to properly access the advanced settings.

 

I accessed it on my first try via a reboot, not a full shut down > start up cycle.

 

Updated first post with more info.

I was able to access the advanced menu with a reboot.

 

This is absolutely fantastic! I'm wondering why no one found this earlier :O
Who else thinks that this should be on the Envy Owners lounge sticky?

EDIT: Actually, turning off hyperthreading did seem to reduce my cpu temperature from ~60°C to ~55°C on average (haven't run any benchmarks yet) but it seems to break S3 (I think) standby. When resuming from standby with HT off, all lights momentarily turn on then shut off a second later only to do the whole thing over again.
Anyone else having this issue? I've got an i7-720QM.

 

You mean it can't resume from standby with HT off?

 

Works with F.24 See here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-envy-hdx/564596-guys-my-envy-14-bios-f-24-a.html#post7290407

 

Just like the F.22 that came back with the repaired 1st Envy I have. That looks like an intermediate release.

 

Worked on F.23! Took a couple of tries though

 

Has anybody got benefits from the fan settings?....changing mine doesn't seem to make a difference. My fan still always stays on at least the low setting until passing 50-52 C when the medium fan speed kicks in more.....regardless of what I do with the "Fan Always On" setting and the fan temp settings in Advanced.

 

I set both the low and medium to 70C so fan does not kick in high even if there's Turbo Boost. Side effect is that the physical surface is hotter.

 

Don't know if it's the fault of my F.24 BIOS, but when I set Low and High speed temperatures for 70C (both) the PC still runs with audible noise (maybe even louder than with stock settings).

 

It will always be audible. I just mean it stays constant at the low fan speed now even when Turbo Boosting, where the high fan speed used to kick in.

 

Oh, okay. It is largely the same by me. It gets louder when I play games with AC connection, but I don't mind. For me, fans are most disturbing with no background noise - when browsing the Internet casually, stuff like that. I hoped fans could be disabled during that time, but it doesn't seem possible. There is a "fan always on" setting in the BIOS, after all. Never seemed to do anything for me (unless HP engineers think that low speed turning means "off")

 

WARNING: Do NOT mess with the settings under Advanced CPU control>DTS enable/critical reporting/disable.

Seems that if the DTS option is set to enable, the bclk will be increased up to 137.4- 14x MHz, causing your processor to be clocked up to 3.5+GHz momentarily and audio will stutter with a "zzzzzz" sound. Monitored with ThrottleStop.

If someone could confirm this it would be best but it's your own responsibility for any actions you may undertake.

 

I get that stuff sometimes even with DTS disabled (noticed it was disabled when I did the advanced stuff and this has happened before we ever had access to the advanced bios).

at least it is rare for me (happened some on one of my older laptops too)

 

It works for me every time on F.23 after a complete system shutdown IF I first press and hold both F10 and A together THEN press and release the power button (still holding F10 and A) THEN release F10 and A once I get the message that says F10 has been pressed.

 

Has anyone tried changing the Video Display Mode Settings yet? Mine is set to Hybrid. I assume that changing it to iGPU or dGPU sets the video to use either the integrated graphics (Intel) or discrete graphics (ATI/AMD), respectively. Any negative side-effects of doing this?

 

well, it may make the laptop angry.

Or it may work like it does for the acer 3820tg.

It lets you turn one of them off (though it may just not let you access one while it's still on draining battery life if you pick integrated only).


Not sure.

 

I just tried it out. I was able to select iGPU and the system behaves as if there is no discrete graphics card installed. When I right-click on the desktop and select Configure Switchable Graphics, the Current Active Graphics Processing Unit field is blank, and clicking on the High-performance GPU or Power-saving GPU fields has no effect. I can't really tell if the ATI card is physically de-powered or just not able to be selected.

I wasn't able to get the dGPU option to work, however. All I got was a black screen with my caps lock key blinking 4 times.

 

Well, guess it half works.

'cause if there was no card being showed in the "swap gpus" and no card being shown in gpu-z (at all) it was turned off.

 

The effect of enabling iGPU seems to be temporary, however. After I restart or shutdown, the next time I boot the setting reverts back to Hybrid.

 

Let me try it later

 

First post updated as it's confirmed

 

I tried booting Windows with dGPU, and it ran in about 800x600 res with weird colors - maybe 256 colors video mode?

I rebooted it immediately and the BIOS settings reset, which made it run in Hybrid mode again just fine.

It's best either not to tamper with that setting, or set it to iGPU (might be mostly useful for Linux users - it should greatly cut the power usage, but that remains to be tested).

 

well I never tried DTS turned on so I dunno how confirmed.

I do know that it messes up for me once in a blue moon without changing the settings at all but whatever.

 

I tried DTS on. It worked fine, then I turned ACPI 3.0 T-States off as it could actually prevent C-states in ACPI 4. After that, my compy started doing the lag + sound glitch

 

For mine, just turning on DTS will trigger the problem/symptom.

 

I just spam'd the A + F10 combo everytime it boots up and most of the time this method will work - you will just get a couple of beeps when it shows up.

Also would also love if anyone can get the dGPU option to work correctly.

 

I noticed that it's key that pressing F10 must still precede hitting A, but not by even a second. Sometimes, I think when I hit the two buttons together that the A gets registered first, preventing the advanced options from coming up.

 

Well, turning off c-state definitely got rid of the whine (!) but my fan is cycling much more now.

Has anyone figured out what temp it's safe to push the settings to before the fans come on?

 

I think we discovered that you can't actually control the fan settings. The numbers are there but they don't actually do anything.

 

While we're on the topic of fans, I decided to dual-boot Vista the other day (don't ask why, I was bored). When using it, I can hear both fans ramping up individually (e.g. the high pitched CPU fan ramps up, then a little while later the lower-pitched back fan ramps up too). Didn't hear this in Win7, so I thought this was interesting.

 

It actually does something - my Envy is now hotter on the surface after i set 70/70/85.