Gigabyte P34G Fan Control

Update: On 08 Jan 14 Gigabyte released a new BIOS that fixes the Fan Spin Up on Idle Problem - I highly recommend you upgrade to 305 .

Also, with the use of Notebeook Fan Control, you can make the fan even quieter with a proper config, so that it turns off almost immediately after heavy load - see page 3+ for more details.

Hi all,

The discussion of this began in the Owners Lounge a few times but progress was not made in part because it was hard to keep the discussion coherent with so many other topics coming up, so this is the attempt to do that, I made this separate, specific thread at the suggestion of droink.

It is a common problem that the fans on the P34G ramp up often when the system is on idle. It is mentioned as the biggest draw back of the system in the Notebook Check review even on Stealth mode, and it can be very annoying in practice.

In the past I had the same sort of issues with the ASUS UX32VD - however we were able to create a configuration file for Notebook Fan Control and this solved the issue - the fan would only ramp up when a custom temperature barrier was reached which was set just above where the system would hit at idle, and it could be adjusted as needed.

Below is some of the details I was able to find and some of the relevant posts about this from the other thread:

Any help on getting this to work would be greatly appreciated. There is at least one user who is going to give up on his P34G, along with everyone thinking about getting it or who are also experiencing this issue.

Thanks,
Peter

 

Apparently someone was able to mod the BIOS and to unlock advanced options (see thread in this subforum). In one of the pictures you can see, there are options to control fanspeed and fan thresholds. Maybe this is the solution for our problem. Also by modifying these options it should be possible to find the correct registers. For example by changing the fan threshold temperature level you can see which register has been changed. This way we could configure Notebook fan control so you dont need a modded BIOS.

 

Agreed, I said thank you to him multiple times - it's great that he was able to find that. I tried asking though what he did to test the temps (if he changed from 55 to 65 or?) and if the values he changed it to saved, but no response except: 'It doesn't work for me.'

I'm really hoping we can do as you said and either fix or (even potentially better) reverse engineer so we can use this .

Thanks,
Peter

 

Any new fixes?

 

Just a heads up I emailed Gigabyte directly and asked them if they had any thoughts or ideas on the matter. Will update when/if I hear back from them.

 

Good idea, it can't hurt, thank you. I'm hoping someone can test out the Unlocked BIOS settings to check the mappings and see if we can reverse engineer from that - or if just changing the Temperature Trip points does what we need, hopefully.

Thanks,
Peter

 

No worries, nothing yet but we'll see. I get my p34g in about two weeks and then will look into it more myself. But my technical understanding of all this is limited at best. Fingers crossed someone with a lot of know how gets involved.

 

I just talked to tech support and he said he would take my request of building my own fan curve to the engineers. However he said more than 10 people need to call in with the same request before they might do something. 1-626-854-9338 opt. 3

Dave

 

Hi Dave, thanks for your post. Wanted to ask though, could you please clarify what you mean? Do you mean a fan cure or a curve design?

Thanks,
Peter

 

Actually if you want to watch the video I just made on it (I have ton of comments on it already) watch here, it might clarify:

 

Dang you're right that was a lot of comments and it's a very well done video, good job and thanks for sharing. I watched the whole thing and read all the comments.

Some things I can say:
- What is the maximum temperature you were reaching when the system was idling/surfing (under light use)? The video is a bit blurry for me to see with my eyes, sorry).
- Yes, you can try undervolting the CPU to lower the temperatures a little bit (especially on load and little (1-2*C max) on idle)
- You can use a cooling stand, either with active cooling fans of its own or just elevating the laptop a little to allow heat to escape more from the vicinity. It is the laptop hitting the trip points that causes it to be louder.
- I had the retailer repaste the CPU and GPU on my machine to lower the temps (it was a free service they offer and I'm hoping it will help, I've heard it can lower the temps by about 5*C across the board)
- I think there is an Intel XTU application that lets you limit the maximum cores/speed which can make it quieter. Note that on battery it is already limited and should be much quieter at all times.
- You can try installing the custom BIOS, it will allow you to set the trip points manually. The download is here: https://mega.co.nz/#!Pcky1QCA!Ac9Ijx6soNoIaTzcWp5SdBy4QoJUr0ISasUlp1cJQAU and some more detail on that unlocked BIOS is here as well.

My thought would be to increase the passive and active thermal trip points above the default 50*C/60*C so that the fan boost will not trigger until a higher level is met (such as 60*C/70*C for example, which will happen if you are really pushing the laptop, but will not if you are only surfing or watching videos).

Ultimately we're hoping to have Notebook Fan Control software work to allow for the user to customize the behaviour from within Windows to be able to set the trip points at will, but for now the unlocked BIOS option seems the best starting point. The one person I know who tried it didn't test it and report back, so you can give that a try and see if it helps.

Let me know what you think, and if any of that doesn't make sense (or does) and thanks again for posting and sharing your experience. I'd be willing to call in and ask for a fix from them but I think those tools to try now will give you the best idea while you decide whether to keep it or not.

All the best,
Peter

 

- 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
- There is an option in the BIOS under Hidden Functions to set the refresh rate of the OS in tenths of a second, I'm thinking changing that might help or make it possible to see what registers are being used.
- Does anyone else have any suggestions on what to try next?

Thanks,
Peter

 

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 106828 .

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.

 

Well done!

I've used your config and it kinda works. I have the same ramping up and down, probably caused by the program and something else (Settings in BIOS/Gigabyte drivers/Smartmanager possibly ???) battleing for the control over the fans.....
But it seems promising! Keep up the good work!

 

Thanks man that's great to have a prototype proof of concept starting point to work from .

I played around with your XML but couldn't really improve it and I've been dealing with bluetooth and other driver issues to try it too much. In a way it is less annoying that the fan goes off after only a couple of seconds rather than 30+ - but I also see how it is more annoying too, it going on, off, on, off (as it is doing as I type this ).

I tried this in conjunction with active and passive cooling, changing the polling interval and critical point - none seemed to improve things. I also tried changing the hidden settings in the BIOS to decrease the thermal polling interval to be the maximum in 10s of a second for passive - but that might not even be used in any of these cases. It feels like we need to get it to reset that value fast enough that the fan doesn't trigger. Unless we could set up some kind of subtraction on the temps themselves in combination with the rest (if the hardware is actually using the data in those bits as opposed to some other source). Did you try changing those dogman?

One other thing I meant to post a couple days back after I did some testing on the simpler methods of fan control:
There is definite throttling with Stealth Fan Mode enabled - load time in Skyrim decreases from 11 seconds to 5.5 seconds if you switch to Auto. N56VZ with High Performance preset is 6 seconds for same save game and settings (and v similar SSD). With 20% Performance the system takes 21 seconds to do the same load.

Thanks a lot again,
Peter

 

Ya, the on and off thing can get quite annoying . What we can do now is set up some kind of profile that keeps the fan on until it hits some lower value (maybe 47*C) and then stops, because otherwise if the trigger is flat at 51, the fan triggers, takes it down to 50 and then it starts up again. It would be great to move that trigger point up to 61 or so instead, but until we can do that if we can get the fan when it does trigger, stay triggered until that target temp is reached (should only take about 5 seconds) then shut down - that would be the next step I think. I think by default it hits 51 and then either takes it to some even lower temp or else just stays on for a set period (30 seconds?) before shutting down until 51*C is hit again.

This is only really useful for the idle state when the 51 is hit for just a moment - if the usage is still there it will keep bumping the heat back up and triggering at 51 again and again until we work out a way around that.

Thanks,
Peter

 

did someone manage to keep the fan always on the lowest speed until 60 or 70°C? Maybe this would be less annoying instead of letting it go on and off again. I thought the guy from NBFC wrote it is possible to override the EC with such a behavior...

 

It should be possible. My thought on ideal behaviour would be to have:

1. Fan complete off until temperature reaches 61*C.
2. When triggered Fan turns off at 55*C (to prevent it instantly coming back on)

That would be user editable based on preference, but I think that would be my ideal setting - that would keep from triggering at 51*C which is hit often when under very short light load when otherwise idling, would take the temp down to a reasonable level when triggered and would keep it otherwise quiet and safe.

NBFC can do all that - with the right configuration - but it's a matter of someone being able to look at it further (as dogman216 was doing, thanks) and finding what registry values need to be set to have this functionality - unless Gigabyte changed things so much from the U2442N and other manufacturers to prevent it from working at all - hopefully it's just a matter of them having made it difficult but not impossible.

Thanks,
Peter

 

If this is true, it's awesome!!!! I will test myself soon too

Peter

 

I've tried the new BIOS version and it works like a charm, the noise is gone! Now i can finally use my laptop at work.

In stealth mode the fan basically never turns on when only doing light office tasks.

 

Yep - I can confirm that is what I'm seeing also in all my tests (the first night I did the BIOS upgrade 2 days ago I was burning CDs all night so couldn't hear the difference - now it's very hard to hear the fan come on at all except gaming ).

Performance doesn't seem to be affected. Even running the Intel XTU in CPU Stress test mode it is silent - really happy with this! .

I would recommend also adjusting Notebook Fan Control's config file - it's a good that when the fan is still on after heavy load, it will turn it off immediately if you set it to 5*C or so below the trip point. I just need to find what the trip point is now - if someone unlocked this BIOS we could see the exact settings but otherwise I'll just observe and try to find it out - so glad Gigabyte listened to the feedback, thanks to all who requested it .

Thanks,
Peter

 

Another BIOS success story here.

So far so good since the update, I never hear the fans during idle time or light usage anymore.

 

So are what config are you guys using for Notebook FanControl? Has someone made one?

 

Any update? Also, any word of a p34g v2 update?