***Gigabyte P34W v3 "Phantasus" owner's lounge***

I also bought mine on Amazon and there are no real build quality issues that I can complain about either. Sure, some things could be a bit better but they're not trouble worthy at all.

 

Got my replacement from XoticPC. I re-pasted it and then stress tested it a decent amount. Thankfully this one doesn't have any of the commonly found issues aside from the uneven touchpad clickers, but the difference in height in mine is barely noticeable. This one also has the US English keyboard layout which I'm very happy about.

If anyone was curious, here's my firestrike benchmark score after the re-paste. http://www.3dmark.com/fs/4731536

Anyone know where to buy a spare charger?

*Edit
I found this www.uspartsdirect.com/150w-original-msi-ge62-ac-adapter-charger-19-5v-7-7a-p-192965.html
Is this site legit?

 

Hi All,

My trying to decide between the P34W v3 and the Alienware 15.
I'm not a serious gamer (i will pay titles such as Mass Effect but i'm fine with Medium/High settings) but i travel A LOT for work.

The P34W will be much more comfortable for me but i have two reservations i was hoping you guys can help me out with:
1) Heat - i almost always game on hard surfaces (and usually a cooling pad when i'm home). How critical are the heating issues with the P34W? Is it something to be concerned with?
2) Flexible Chasis - i travel a lot and my laptop will be bounced a lot in my backpack. Can the P34W handle some travelling? (in a padded laptop slot in a backpack of course)

Thanks!

 

Deleted

 

Hello Ned,

The issues you mention being worried about shouldn't be an issue, especially if you aren't looking to run the most demanding games out there. Like other people have done in this thread, I would either get the repaste done when you order the notebook for better cooling or do it yourself if you feel comfortable enough taking of the supracool heatsink system. There is also the ability to undervolt the CPU which other people have done which will keep the temperature low enough on the CPU to avoid thermal throttling of the CPU and GPU since most games these days aren't extremely CPU heavy. To undervolt, you can simply download the intel extreme tuning utility and follow the countless guides on the internet. Most people are finding ~ 60mv to be a good undervolt to avoid throttling. With any changes to voltage settings though, you should stress test it afterwards to make sure it is stable.

As far as flexibility goes, it was an issue touched on by linus in his review of the notebook and seems to be an issue with the build quality in general. But if you're going to be keeping it in your laptop sleeve of your backpack, I don't see it being an issue unless you're just tossing it around willy nilly.

If mobility is your biggest concern, I would not even consider the Alienware 15. I personally wouldn't consider them period, because they put components on the backburner to brand and looks. The P34WV3 is a traveling gamer or professional's wet dream as far as I'm concerned, as long as you receive a good unit.

My personal suggestion is this laptop.

Happy hunting!

 

Hi

I'm considering buying this laptop for gaming and college. Will I get heat issues if I play BF4/GTAV/Witcher3 ?
What about throttling? Should I be worried about any of these problems if I have "normal" use of the laptop? Can I just ignore all these and be fine or should I buy thermal paste and install intel XTU to undervolt and blah and blah and blah ?

Finally, do you think this laptop is futureproof for this generation of consoles? (XOne/PS4) I mean will I be able to play games in like 4-5 years on it even if I play with everything on low/med?

 

Thank you!
I guess the P34W is the way i'm going to go

 

@nonofax
The Games you listed will all play well on this laptop. As for throttling...You have many options to avoid that, just read this whole thread. This laptop also lets you manually set fan speed and if you're really nervous about temperature's before you do a repaste or undervolt (I wou suggest both) just set fan speed to max when gaming and that should keep temps down.

 

Alright so if I do those 2 things (repaste and undervolt) I won't have to worry anymore about temp/throttling?

 

My apologies for quoting a rather old post, but I finally was able to try that trick.
To make a long story short: I can only boot the USB drive that comes with Gigabyte's factory settings, no other USB or CD would boot (I created a few recoveries with macrium reflect, a program I have been using for years). Usapatriot directed me to this link to turn off UEFI and Secure Boot and, guess what, that trick doesn't work. :/

I followed the instructions of the link posted above: rebooted and navigated to advanced options.



I clicked on UEFI Firmware Settings and this is what I got (hint: not much).



Restarting simply sends me to the Bios, and the boot options are rather "simple": I can't select any boot order! I am afraid of trying anything else and breaking something (I know what you would say: highly improbable...Well, you don't know me!).



Should I set Bootup NumLock State to one?
Boot Option #1 only gives me one option:


As for OS Type, I can't select anything.

How do I boot up from a CD? Am I missing something? '.'

 

Did you try go to "Save &Exit" and restore Windows 7 > Save and Exit > go back to BIOS and > set the OS type to Legacy?

 

I haven't tried that, I will give it a try. However, I am not on windows 7 but on windows 8.1: is the procedure the same?

 

@nonofax
Every one of these machines differ in various ways so by no means am I guaranteeing that you'll have no throttling . I Am simply stating that you have many options open to you with the P34w v3. Personally I can tell you that for me doing the repaste pretty much brought the temps down to the the lower 90c range for the CPU with the fan set to auto. Even before I did the repaste, I used max fan speed while gaming and rarely had any throttling issues. Now at max fan, the fans are loud... One of the loudest in the industry (you can see that on the Notebookcheck review). The fan noise annoys some people but It doesn't bother me to much. I Personally think the P34w v3 is like the best of both worlds... The size and weight of an ultrabook with the power of a bulky gaming laptop. The Only laptop that compares to it is the new Razer laptop which costs a good deal more and is not as upgradable as the P34w v3. So the choice is yours.. If you're not comfortable with the hands on approach this laptop may not be right for you. But, if you are...

 

It depends on what kind of boot disk you trying to use, if it's legacy then by load Windows 7 Default will set the boot method to Legacy mode. If your boot disk is UEFI then you don't need to bother with it.

Also you can try press F12 at Gigabyte logo screen and it will detect the bootable device and let you choose which one to boot from.

 

@seanno

Will I get some throttling with these specs?:
i7 4720, 8gb ram, gtx 970m, 5400 rpm hdd

I'm willing to do the repaste and all, I just bought IC7 Diamond on amazon (heard it's the best paste: is it?). How low should I keep the temps? under 90C is good or will it damage my internals over time?

Thanks a lot for your answers! I'm gonna buy it soon I think ^^

 

I personally don't like it when temps go over 90C. I'm sure it's engineered to withstand that heat but it makes me uncomfortable personally. When I initially got my P34W I played some games to test it to make sure it didn't have GPU issues like my previous one. The CPU temperature would stay around 91C but would get up to 96C occasoinally while the GPU would stay around 78C and would go up to 83C.

After the repaste my CPU stays around 83C and goes up to 87C while the GPU stays around 73C and goes up to 80C. I doubt I'm seeing any throttling at those temperatures. However, while playing more intensive games like Dying Light and Grand Theft Auto V, I've seen the CPU get up to 92C and the GPU get up to 86C.

 

@nonofax
Although the Ic7 is probably not considered to be the "best" thermal paste, it is long lasting. Meaning you won't have to reapply it every few of months. I Used it before and had good results with it.
This laptop runs hot. It's very thin and you have to expect some heat. Keeping temps on your CPU under 96c is the key if it reaches that temperature you will have throttling. Are temperatures over 90c good? Well probably not in the long run. The life of the CPU may definitely be effected. Exactly what that translates to in years of use I couldn't tell you. Others on this thread have done things like disabling turboboost, under volting and limiting the CPU speed. All of these actions seem to be effective in lowering temperatures. If you have not yet read the whole thread, I would suggest you do.

 

Ok, thanks Ken: I was able boot on my rescue CD! Only problem now, the program doesn't load properly and I only get a black screen, don't really know why. I'll try creating a new bootable CD.

 

@colin06
Which paste did you use? I ordered IC7 Diamond, is it any good? Is there anything better?

@seanno
I did read bits of the thread but I still wasnt sure ^^
Also, do I have to reapply the paste every few months? Oo every ... wht? 3-4 months? ALso, does the paste go "bad" if I don't use it for a long time?

one last for the road: how do you see gpu and cpu temp on pc? thx a lot!

 

It looks to me that there is no data to be load from the bootable CD. Let us know if create another bootable CD works.

 

Hello,

It's going to be my first time getting my first gaming laptop and I've saved a lot of money just to get one and I want this to be worth it that won't disappoint and regret later on.

I'd like to ask the owner about the build quality of this laptop, the screen display, the performance and most especially the cooling system.

I heard problems such as GPU throttling issue and I wonder about that.

I already have a lineup of Sager/Clevo but I'm tempted with P34W because of its thinness.

 

There's a lot of misinformation about thermal paste out there, designed to make you want to buy more paste or spend a lot more money on it than you really have to.

First, let's describe what the paste is supposed to do. The CPU's heat spreader and the bottom of the heat sink are not perfectly flat. When you mate the two together, there are microscopic air gaps which form between the two. The gaps can be reduced somewhat by compressing the two (which is why these things come with spring-loaded straps or screws). But they will always be there.

Copper has a coefficient of thermal conductivity of about 500 W/m*K. In other words, if there's a 1 degree Kelvin (Celsius) thermal gradient between two ends of a copper pipe, you'd expect heat energy to travel 1 meter along the pipe at a rate of 500 Watts (500 Joules of energy per second).

Air has a coefficient of about 0.024 W/m*K. 20,000x slower than copper. So an air gap substantially degrades the rate of heat transfer. Some bright guys looked at this and said, "what if we could get some squishy deformable material to fill in those air gaps?" And thus was born thermal compound (aka thermal paste).

Most pastes have a coefficient of about 1 to 5 W/m*K. Still two orders of magnitude worse than pure copper, but also two orders of magnitude better than air.

The two things to take home from this are:

1. The vast majority of the heat transfer is via metal-on-metal contact (much higher coefficient = more heat transmitted that way). You do not want to spread a layer of thermal paste like mayonnaise between the two metal parts, because that will eliminate the metal-on-metal contact and make the situation much worse than if you'd had no thermal paste at all. Yes you can run a system without any thermal paste. They actually run pretty well in fact (60W TDP Intel, and 90W TDP AMD).




2. For paste to be effective, it has to fill in as many air gaps as possible. If there's still some air, you've now got a a air-paste thermal link in series (heat must travel through the air, then through the paste). And the coefficient of thermal conductivity of two materials in series (50% air, 50% paste along the same distance) is the harmonic mean. 2/k = 1/k1 + 1/k2. If k1 is air at 0.024 and k2 is paste at 2.5, then k = 2/(1/0.024 + 1/2.5) = 0.048 W/m*K. So as you can see, the smaller k (air) dominates. You must eliminate all the air for paste to be effective.

So a good paste and a good paste job will completely fill in all the air gaps, without reducing metal-on-metal contact. To that end, you want a gooey paste, and you want to use as little of it as necessary. I make sure both surfaces are absolutely clean (a grain of dirt or speck of dust can cause the heatsink to tilt relative to the CPU, reducing metal-on-metal contact). I use about a half-pea sized drop of paste, and squish it around to spread it until I feel the metal grinding on metal. Then I clamp it down. If you're applying the paste like a layer of mayonnaise in a sandwich, you're using way too much.

So to answer your questions, the paste only needs to be reapplied if it shrinks as it dries up, re-forming air gaps. I'd say that's a devastatingly poor characteristic for a paste, which makes me suspect no properly designed paste really behaves this way. And it's more likely a myth developed by PC enthusiasts who noticed temperatures rising after a few months, removed the heatsink, and saw the thermal paste was dried and blamed that. The real culprit was probably dust build-up on the heatsink and fan (you should blow those out with compressed air every few months).

The paste in the tube "goes bad" only if it loses its gooeyness. If it can't "flow" enough to fill in air gaps, then it's pretty useless as thermal paste. But if it's gooey enough to displace air in microscopic gaps, then it's good to go.

I'll also add that if you think about (2), adding silver (k=429) or diamond (k=1000) to the thermal paste is mostly a marketing gimmick. Those materials are normally solid, so to make them flow into and completely fill air gaps, you have to mix them with a gooey filler. The filler typically has a coefficient around k=2. And when you mix it with a high-conductivity solid, the result (assuming a 50/50 mix by volume) can only at best double the value of k. For silver, the resulting k = 3.98. For diamond the resulting k = 3.99. Nowhere near the k for the silver or diamond alone, and there's actually not much difference between the two.

 

I used IC7 Diamond, a smaller drop than a pea, on the GPU and a thin line on the CPU. The standard paste job was pretty bad. Mine had about 3x more paste than it needed.

 

There is data: I've been using that CD for years and the program has been booting on all the laptops I have own, except for the P34W. The program on the CD seems to boot on the P34W, but I only get a black screen.


Actually, does the Smart USB backup program allows you to create an image of windows at the current date, or only an image of the of the factory settings?

 

The Smart USB backup only create factory image of Windows. However, you can create a current Windows image backup by going to:

> Control Panel > File History > Create System Image. But it only works if you connect a external USB hard drive or CD/DVD but not a USB thumb drive. I recommend use external USB hard drive than CD/DVD so you don't have to burn 2,534 CD/DVDs.

 

I did it with a thumb drive.

 

Ok, I will give it a try. It does bug me a bit because I already created a backup, it's just that the laptop can't load the rescue CD for it. Two questions: to reinstall an image created by windows, do I need to boot from a CD or something? How much space would I need on a hard drive to create the backup?

 

Ordered my p34w v3 with SSD from xotic PC, requested the diamond re-paste and specifically asked them to check for any physical defects, such as the trackpad, when putting it back together so I can save time returning a faulty unit. I'm looking forward to getting it and undervolting ASAP.

edit: damnit, xotic tried to charge me 350 usd to shipping (quote was 110) and make me wire transfer instead of use my American credit card. Cancelled and bought from HIDevolution with a repaste. Hopefully it goes smoothly.

 

Wow it seems like Xotic PC's service is going down the toilet. Lately I've read many complaints about them... They used to have a great reputation.

 

In bizzaro world news, very happy with HIDevolution. I just got a few calls from them to confirm my credit card/address and double-check that it's a rush shipment, so they'll try to paste it and ship it by tomorrow. I even requested that they check the trackpad for any abnormalities for me, and they assured they'd do it. Hopefully it's all smooth and I can get my sweet sexy ridiculous laptop soon.

 

Do you know if that program does anything else? It's 1.5 GB in size. I have a hard time believing the only thing it does is create a factory image. If I hadn't replaced the 128GB SSD with a 500GB, I would've uninstalled it after making the backup, just to reclaim the space.

 

We do accept cards for payment if we are shipping to the US or Canada or any of their territories. If you ship internationally we do require payment by bank wire transfer, even if its a US card we unfortunately do not accept that for payment for international orders. I believe the $110 you mentioned is the price you may have seen during the checkout process. That is just a rough estimate as shipping prices will vary depending on what country you ship to and final value of the computer. Once we process the order we get you the actual shipping cost which does also include insurance, then provide that to you. It can be expensive to ship notebooks, the price we provide is the actual shipping cost we do not mark it up. You can verify that by going to ups.com and checking. We do understand it can be expensive to ship, and if it is too much we can cancel the order and there are not fees for doing so.

I am sorry to hear you feel that way, unfortunately this is just our policy and really has nothing to do with the service we provide. We do strive to provide the best customer service we can.

 

Thanks for your reply. I was going to do the wire transfer, but when I saw the shipping quote went from 110 to $380 USD... that's ridiculous. I wouldn't pay that much if they magically teleported it to me. If that's UPS's quote, I would recommend other options.

I can't check the courier now that the order has been processed, but HIDE charged $111.42 S&H. Not sure if it was USPS, UPS, FEDEX, or DHL.

 

We are actually in the process of switching to Fedex due to UPS complaints and cost. Fedex will be cheaper and also their delivery is 1 day faster in delivery in the states

 

I just got the shipping notification. They used DHL.

 

Hey guys, what's up! I haven't been able to spend much time here because of work. I hope everyone is enjoying their P34W's, I really wish I had more time to spend with mine! All I've been playing is BF4 still. There really aren't any new games that interest me at the moment.

BTW, did anyone get a free copy of the Witcher 3 with their P34W since it has a 970m and should've technically qualified for that promotion?

 

I just got mine in yesterday and haven't gotten to do any burn in tests and start tweaking with the voltage supply for the cpu, but I everything is in tip top shape aside from the fact that it wobbles on a flat surface. I am just going to shave an adhesive rubber foot down to the right height to level it out and slap that bad boy on it and call it a day.

Even though Gentech PC didn't say they were sending me The Witcher 3 with mine when I built it on their website, when I received it yesterday the code was in the box with the laptop DD

 

Make sure it really wobbles before you shave it down! Mine wobbled but then it stopped wobbling. Maybe the little rubber feet need to settle. That's awesome! It seems like it'll be great. I never received a code from Amazon even after contacting them a few times and customer service completely failing me, ah well!

 

Hi, I've noticed that my battery drains when the computer is completely turned off and nothing is plugged in. the rate of discharge is approximately 1% per day.
So to let everyone know and see if others notice the same or have a solution for it.

 

Totally normal. Self-discharge happens with all batteries.

 

this rate is a little on the fast side, won't you think? in fact i've batteries that i can pick 6 months later and they haven't discharge much.

edit: I've disconnected the battery. i'll let it sit one week and see if it makes any difference.

 

and another problem i can add to the list.

While I was playing some Advaned Warfare I noticed the FPS suddenly going down and the screen brightness. Quickly alt-tabbing to see what was happening I noticed the battery icon showing it wasn't connected to the AC adaptor, while it was connected. Checked all cables and everything was in check. Removed the cables and reinserted them afterwards, still no change. I shut down the laptop and rebooted, after that it was normal again. But it seems that this is not a good sign and something is failing within this laptop maybe. Getting tired of this piece of junk.

This will be my last Gigabyte product. It just doesn't give a feeling of confidence owning this laptop in any way.

 

Is there any way to shut Hyperthreading off on this thing?

 

Glad you received the free Witchers 3 game code.

Sometimes we might run out the free game code, however, we will still honor and provide free game code to existing customers when next free game code promotion is running. Whoever didn't get the free game code for the existing promotion just shoot us email and we will gladly provide the next game code.

 

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/9820078

P34W V3 whith 1.3ghz core and 3 ghz mem

But i throttle hard with cpu at 3.4 ghz... it is a too hot /power comsuming cpu for this laptop , a 35W would be better.

 

I can understand your frustration, Gigabyte has a long way to go in terms of quality control. However, I think with the P34W's it's a hit or miss for most people. Some seem to get units that are better than others or perhaps people's tolerance of what they consider a solid system is different. I can't really complain about the performance in a compact package. The build quality issues are less than excusable. The heat and throttling issues are a null point because everyone should have known what they were getting themselves into when they bought such a portable and powerful system. I am happy with mine, but maybe not with how much it cost because I definitely think some things could have been better for how much it was.

You can turn it off in the BIOS.

 

If you horribly und

undervolt and turn off turbo it should be ok, no? Would hyperthreading lower temps without lowering performance so much?

 

Which bios are you on mine doesn't seem to have that setting?

 

Could be using throttlestop.