NEW Gigabyte P34 V2

Removing the mSATA won't be an issue, just need to make sure the OS gets reinstalled onto the drive that is present. If you're getting it through a reseller with that being requested should be the case by default. If doing it yourself you'll need to make sure you have a means of reinstalling the OS.

 

Oh thanks for the replies! At this point I think I would get the version with the mSATA (possibly 250+ GB)!

 

Ok, that's a relief to know. Maybe the XoticPC rep got confused. But regardless, I'm glad that the the CF2 variant from XoticPC has the Maxwell chip.

 

Can XTU turn off hyper threading or can it simply be disabled in the laptops's bios?

 

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Gigabyte-P34G-v2-Notebook-Review.120354.0.html

Notebookcheck review is out

 

What do you mean with that? Why did you expect higher fps? Do you get lower fps than other 860m machines or didn't you just read enough benchmarks about that GPU?

Please let me shoot some questions at you

1. Crysis 3: What Texture Resolution setting? FXAA i guess?
2. Did you run Crysis 3 already with you VRAM OC? Did you OC your core, too (+135mhz ?)
If you ran with OC, did you get noticeable difference in framerate?
3. May i ask what stock (no OC!) core clock you get on your P34g v2 under load (crysis 3 for example)? Sebi97 reported 1098mhz. Can you confirm that on your device?

Thanks, mate

 

Hey US friends, in august I'll be there for three weeks and I'll get one of those beasts
I currently live in Europe and the laptop is pretty hard to find/buy. Any suggestion for quick service/delivery?
P.s. I'll be in California.

Thanks a lot.

 

Has someone tried limiting fps with nvidia inspector in order to reduce heat?? Thanks.


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Thanks for your reply
Only going from +250 to +300 on VRAM resulted in +5fps? That's not that bad actually!

Particularly interesting to me would be a direct comparison between stock clocks vs OC. Don't know if you wanted to illustrate that in your video anyway?
Your games are great. If you additionally have some games with integrated benchmarks, would be great for best possible comparison stock vs OC...
If you could show or at least write down the temps of CPU and GPU in the video description, would be helpful, too.

Looking forward to your videos. Thanks in advance

 

So I'm having some weird issues- with my OC clock, when I play on my monitor via HDMI, I sometimes get an error (see attachement) followed by a crash. So far I've only noticed it happening in BF4. Anyone know why this is happening? Display mode is set to "second screen only"



On a side note; the poll indicates the majority of people want my future videos done with shadow-play; so I will be doing that

 

Can any owners tell me if the bios has an option to disable hyperthreading?

 

I just re-pasted my CPU and GPU with Arctic MX-4, and am now getting 4-5C lower temperatures compared to stock paste. I am also able to undervolt the CPU with Intel XTU by -80mV - any more, and it blue-screens.

One of the fans was making terrible noises when the laptop was tilted, but I gently bent the fan casing to give the blades more clearance and it's fine now.

 

I have read all 92 pages of this thread, and really would like to buy a P34v2. probably from Xoticpc.
I have a few questions for you owners. As stated in my Name, I am a LaptopNub...so I really don't want to have to open the unit for any mods. I just want the system to ready to go. I am aware that these upgrades are not cheap. If I have MISSED anything you feel is a MUST....example upgraded warranty, pixel warranty etc.... please let me know. Thank you for all your help and I really appreciate these forums and the people who post and reply.

1. Repaste with IC Diamond - Yes

2. Ram (Stock is 8GB DDR3 1600MHz [SKU-812P] (Memory (1x8GB SODIMM)) Should I get the Upgrade to (16GB DDR3 1600MHz [SKU-818EP] (Dual Channel Memory (2x8GB SODIMMS)????

3. SDD (Stock 128GB Solid State Drive mSATA) Upgrade to >>250GB Samsung 840 EVO Series Solid State mSATA ????

4. HDD - (Stock 1TB 5400RPM (SATA II - 3GB/s) ) Upgrade to 750GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache (SATA II - 3GB/s) or something else????

5 Remove Unwanted Bloatware? No clue if i should keep the defaut selection (Keep factory installed operating system ) or Choose >> Clean Windows Installation (Install drivers only - no bloatwares) (For factory installed OS only, not required if OS upgrade is selected) ????

6.System Recovery BackUp - Yes / No - Yes, please create a Windows 8.1 32GB USB Drive manufacturer factory backup recovery????

Thanks again for anyone who replies

 

1. Yes, go for it. It is fairly easy though to re-paste yourself though- check my video out
2. Don't upgrade the RAM yet. This is a super easy upgrade you can definitely do yourself with RAM you might find at a good price on sale. Also, you might not even need more than 8gb... (I do heavy gaming and I never find myself needing more)
3. Optional: Here is what I would do: leave it stock BUT have the HDD removed (will be 40$ cheaper). When you get it, place this in the HDD bay. Easy upgrade
4. See above; essentially we are keeping the stock mSATA and putting a ssd in the SATA
5. No... Definitely not. This laptop comes with minimal bloatware anyway; you can uninstall yourself if you really need too. (most of the stuff it comes with (such as smart manager) are actually really handy)
6. No, no point in my opinion. You could always get a cheap 10$ 16gb USB to move the recovery partition off of the mSATA to the USB

Hope that helped

 

Hi Sebi97,

unfortunately i don't really know something about your problem, but i did some researching for you.

What was remarkable is, that when you start typing in google "directx out of..." google already shows you requests like "directx out of memory error" or even "directx out of memory BF4". So that doesn't seem to be a rare error and additionally doesn't seem to depend on gaming per hdmi on an external monitor as i guess you assumed...?

Maybe not so worthful information, but that said, i hope/think there should be more than enough information to find.

In one forum i found that statement. Maybe that already works for you...?

Hope this helps.

 

Ha, ha Ok, that was a misunderstanding. It's more about on what base you get 5 fps more though. If we are talking about 25 without and 30 with the OC, it's a nice slight increase in performance. On for example around 40 vs 45 it's insiginificant of course...
What percentage improvement would you estimate? Around 15% or so?

When do you think your first vids will be up? Can't wait for them.

 

Thanks for your help- this issue was only when using a second monitor so it was definitely weird. I've managed to fix the problem though I've removed any low-memory monitoring by windows. The risk with this is windows will not tell you when low on RAM- it will simply crash. However, with 12gb of RAM this should not matter.... Here is how I removed the low memory monitoring:

After this; no more errors

 

I've also just received this cooling mat; temperatures dropped about 4 degrees on GPU; but here is the most important part. The laptop bottom felt cool to touch which is EXTREMELY important. Many people look only on die temperatures; when something fails it is usually a capacitor or other "minor" part. The cooling pad shouldn't be seen as just lowering GPU/CPU temp by 5 degrees but rather keeping the overall temperature of the laptop lower; crucial for the longevity of the laptop.

 

Question to owners: How many tile rows do you have? I'm trying to get 6 to show but only have 4

Here is an example with 4
Here is an example with 6

 

Are you going to make clear in your videos when showing temps if this is with or without cooling pad?
Are you still on auto fan or did you change to turbo fan because of overclocking/overvolting and therefore higher temps? Btw. how big is the difference in temps between auto and turbo?

Great, mate. Looking very forward to them

 

Thank You Sebi for your quick reply. Have a great day

 

Sorry to ask again, but can any current owners check to see if there is a way to disable hyperthreading?

 

Is that 4-5 degree drop in temps with the undervolt and repaste, or just the repaste? If that is just with the repaste, how much more did the temps drop under load with the undervolt?

 

That was just with the repaste (I'd undervolted before that, and reckon it reduced the temperature maybe 1C, but wasn't really checking - the main benefit I saw was that the CPU throttled less under the Intel XTU stress test with the undervolt).

I've just moved for work, and the ambient temperature here is about 30C, and the laptop CPU temps hover around 50-60C when browsing, etc. (mainly around the 53C mark). Before the repaste and undervolt, in 20C ambient, I was in the high 50s...

Note: I'm using the Gigabyte fan control on "auto".

 

Did you try drag the tiles to make extra rows? I just tried mine and I can get 6. You have to make sure that the columns are full before an extra row can be created though.

 

Thanks for the info. I'm worried about long-term usage and temps with this laptop (on top of my opinion that it's $100 overpriced). Coming from my last laptop that I owned for nearly two years, towards the last several months temps were up considerably despite repasting with high quality TIM.

 

Just did 3DMark11; here is my result.

This is with core at 1387mHz, voltage at 1.100V. Temperatures are about 83-84 BUT I am on a 21 mm laptop so that is fairly understandable....
This puts it just above the 870m in the razer blade!!!! Here is that result!

 

I'm gonna disagree slightly with Sebi97 when it comes to drives.

On top of this, when you have an SSD, swapping is much less painful than with a mechanical HDD. My old laptop had an SSD but only 4 GB of RAM. It would start swapping whenever I fired up Photoshop. But unlike a HDD computer where everything pretty much freezes until it's finished writing to the swapfile, the SSD makes the computer still usable. You can definitely notice it slows down, but it doesn't freeze. It was good enough that I waited several months until there was a good sale on memory before upgrading to 8 GB.

What you want to do with the drives really depends on how you're going to use the laptop. How much space are you going to need? How much are you willing to pay?

If you can fit everything in 256 GB (most people can), then you can do as Sebi97 suggests. His idea still works if you can afford a bit more and live in 512 GB. (I'm mostly ignoring the stock 128 GB space because you don't want to fill up a SSD. You want to keep about 20%-30% free. Unlike a HDD where you can overwrite a 0 with a 1 and vice versa, an SSD needs to erase the 0 or 1 first before you can write something new to it. This erase takes a lot more time than writing, so is usually done while the drive is idle. The more free space you have, the more space the drive can erase in the background and have prepped for new writes, and the "faster" it responds. So a 128 + 256 GB setup means you can store about 290 GB of files across both drives. A 128 + 512 GB setup means about 480 GB of files.)

If you're going to need more space and don't want to pay for a larger SSD, then you will want to replace the default mSATA SSD and keep the 2.5" HDD. The Samsung EVO series is a really good choice for replacing the mSATA SSD because its drivers cache to system memory. This allows it to occasionally exceed the 600 MB/s SATA 3 limit, but more importantly it tremendously improves non-queued reads of small files.

AnandTech | Samsung SSD 840 EVO Review: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB & 1TB Models Tested

In Anandtech's tests, the drive already produced an impressive 93 MB/s at random 4k reads with no queueing (most competitors are around 30-60 MB/s at this stat). But with caching this improves to 300 MB/s. That's as fast as most SSDs score on this benchmark with a queue depth of 32 (reading 32 different files at once). That's a very significant improvement because the vast majority of your perceived speedup when using a SSD is from this stat. HDDs absolutely suck at it, with only the faster large 7200 RPM HDDs managing to exceed 1 MB/s (yes, one MB/s).

As for 5400 or 7200 RPM on the HDD, that again depends on what you're going to use it for. I dislike the extra vibration and power draw that comes from 7200 RPM. Energy goes as rotational velocity squared, so the 7200 RPM drive is using about 78% more energy than the 5400 RPM drive. If you're mostly going to store movies and static media on the HDD, then 5400 RPM is more than acceptable.

But if you're going to be installing a ton of games which won't fit on a 256 GB or even 512 GB mSATA SSD, then you may want the 7200 RPM HDD for running games. Personally, I tend to play the same game a lot for weeks while my other games sit unused. So I'd just keep the 5400 RPM drive, and copy the game of the week onto the SSD and run it off the SSD.

 

Wow, quite amazing result.
On the 3d mark page stands 1320Mhz though?

In any case quite high clock rates. Your VRAM is OCed, too?
Sorry, for asking you that again and again, but just to get a quite accurate picture of cooling capability : I guess you still use auto fan like always?
Did you already test gaming or benchmarking with turbo fan? What temp difference did you get?

You guys really make me excited on your videos, as i'm almost sold on that laptop...

 

I'm not sure why 3DMark 11 is reporting the core incorrectly, it's running at 1387MHz according to Afterburner. Yes, the VRAM has a +600 OC. I use fan on auto ALWAYS unless I state otherwise . Using turbo only shaves a degree or two and I only use it when I'm using a headset where noise really doesn't matter.

 

Excellent answer and I agree with you for the most part. The part I disagree is that SSD's need to be 30% empty to function at full speed. This may have been true in the past, SATA 3 and modern controllers have pretty much eliminated that as an issue. With 50gb free and 4.3gb free, I get about the same read/write speeds (+/- 5mb/s). I can also vouch for the 840 evo ssd; excellent drive. In the end you are correct it really depends on what you will use PC for. If not storing lots of movies (which is what takes the most room) and having games only, ssd just makes sense. Also remeber that with ssd, you will get a boost in battery life due to lack of moving parts

 

Ha, ha. Ok, then i know about that and don't have to ask that again...
Man, quite big OCs on core and memory. I guess your core OC is +290 Mhz as you said your stock boost clock is 1097Mhz?

For me it would be perfectly fine, to get to around 1300 Mhz (therefore around +200 Mhz) and VRAM with around +450 Mhz to get to a custom design of a OCed 750Ti like a Palit or similar. Hopefully would be achievable with slightly lower overvolting and temps though...?
Quite disappointed of the marginal difference though... Max fan stage is significantly louder and faster than your reported 2nd fan stage on auto and only 1-2 °C improvement...?

Do you have any idea, when your modded BIOS by Prema is available to public?

Lastly another topic: What i like about 1080p on 14 inch is the high pixel density and sharpness. But on the other hand the screen is often reported to be a lil bit grainy. Does this slight grainy finish mess the (visual) sharpness of the screen up a bit?

Sorry, for shooting tons of questions on you.

 

Yea that fan Auto vs. Turbo is interesting because like you said the noise difference is big while temperature difference is not... Perhaps this is why when on Auto, fans never reach turbo speed; it simpoly does not make sense... I keep asking Prema about it, but I'm not sure. Try messaging him; if he sees lots of people are interested, he will make one
The screen is fine for quality in my opinion, everything looks sharp to me; of course this is subjective though. The matte screen is a must on any laptop in my opinion. I was just outside on a sunny day with brightness at 70% and everything was fine thanks to no glare; just awesome. I despise that it is 1080 though... 1600*900 would of been a WAAAY better choice in my opinion. On this size, a quality 900p panel looks just as good as a 1080 one while increasing (SIGNIFICANTLY) the fps (By about 20) and battery life.

 

Hi ephesix and thanks for your video.

I'm quite a bit surprised about your fps in Crysis 3 though, which according to notebookcheck are supposed to be around 19 fps on ultra...
Therefore i'm quite curious of your framerate frequently hovering in the low 20s and sometimes under 20 (outside area, like the benchmark sequence of nbc is) but with settings most on medium + a few on high.
I know Crysis 3 is a extremely demanding game, but on that settings i didn't expect that low framerates only slightly above notebookcheck's ultra setting, especially when keeping in mind that your 860m is even OCed...
EDIT: Just watched your Afterburner screen after Crysis 3. The clockrate graph seems to be a bit inconsistent, doesn't it?

What makes that even more confusing is that your Far Cry 3 fps are impressively high though. FC3 should be similar in terms of hardware requirements (notebookcheck measured ~23 fps on ultra, which is very close to Crysis 3's 19 fps).
But your fps are extremely higher with around 30-40 on ultra settings than the ~16-35 (outside area) on mid-high on crysis3...

What also makes me wonder is the framerate on watch dogs. As you say this game seems to be quite poorly optimised (the wall graphics glitches at the end of the video LOL ) and to me it's inacceptable that Ubisoft releases a title with these issues.
But anyway, also on watch dogs measures of notebookcheck seem to be significantly higher. (Note that the tested 860m there is Kepler, but as the Maxwell version is at least as fast as the 770m this still should be comparable...)

Please don't get me wrong. Definitely don't wanna badmouth your laptop, but i'm very confused about the performance especially in Crysis 3 but also in watch dogs though...

Temps of around 84°C if i saw that correctly also seem to be a bit high, as you didn't overvolt your GPU...? Sebi97 reported max 84°C but with a significant overvolt...

 

Ah, ok. Congrats. Excited to see what differences that will bring...
Have to admit that I don't know so much about Crysis 3 and it's settings but shouldn't game effects, particles, post processing, shadows all set to medium and motion blur even disabled bring at least bit more, especially with the OC??
Just quite confused about that though, especially because your Far Cry 3 fps are significantly higher on ultra settings than your Crysis 3 fps on mid-high settings (outside again) although both titles should be quite on par regarding hardware requirements and frames per second according to notebookcheck's benchmarks...

If you're going to redo some gaming tests with your new modified vBIOS anyway, could you then reproduce notebookcheck's benchmarksequence (check out the video under the headline 'benchmark') one time with their ultra settings and another time with their high preset (except their crappy 1366x768 resolution , but 1080p) again? Would be quite interesting to see the direct comparison between notebookcheck's bench with stock 860m and your OCed one as well as the comparison between the very high and high preset...

 

There is a new bios version and a bunch of new drivers available in the smart update application. Has anyone tried the new bios version? Thanks


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I did apply the new BIOS: Only noticeable change to me (there's probably more that isn't visible to the end user): A revised boot screen featuring a bigger Gigabyte logo.

 

Question to all owners - what backup solution do you use for the ssd?

What is the size of the OS install on the ssd?

One of the first things I like to do with any new system is make sure I've got a reliable clean slate, should anything go seriously wrong... but having never used windows 8 I'm not sure what the best option is. Would be nice to create a recovery usb flash drive - is windows 8 built in backup/restore good enough?

 

I bought a cheap 5$ 16gb USB that I moved the recovery partition if anything should go wrong. Also, turning off hibernation will save you 8gb on the ssd (if you have 8gb RAM).

Also, guys, I have GREAT news

I have finally finished filming and editing my battlefield 4 OC video I will set it to upload tonight so in about 12 hours; it should be up

 

Excellent, thank you. I've just looked up the procedure and it looks pretty straightforward to move or copy the recovery partition to a usb stick. I'll make sure to buy a 16GB stick then.

Another question to all owners - what bag or protective case are you using to carry this? I know it's got a thin sleeve included, but I'm looking for something with a hard external shell - or a bag with a built in protected compartment.
I carry things with me that would be likely to damage the laptop if only in a soft sleeve, so looking to either get a new bag (I kind of need one in any case) or a hard case for the laptop.

Just like to make sure I have things prepared in advance, even though I might not be buying for a month or so.

 

I carry mine in the soft sleeve ll the time and it's fine in my opinion. The sleeve is sturdy enough to be safe but it will not resist bending or impacts so if that is your usage scenario then you will need a hard case.

 

New video is up now

Hope you guys like it; took a really long time to create/edit/render/upload

 

Hi Sebi and thanks for your gameplay video,

jup, it really took a very long time especially considering that you announced them over three weeks ago... Was a hard waiting time... Just kidding. Very nice, to finally see your results.

Only thing that i missed in your video is a comparison between OC and stock. Of course that wouldn't make sense on BF 4 Multiplayer, but as you said that you're going to make more vids:

Could you maybe choose one sector of a level in a single player game (Far cry 3, crysis 3...) and just run from your chosen start point some hundred meters to a target point, monitoring the min, avg and max fps (just like notebookcheck does it's game benchmarks) and doing that once with stock and once with your OC?
Don't know if shadowplay can record min, avg and max fps? If not, Fraps could do this without hitting frame rate, as that only occurs by videorecording with it)

That would be most interesting to see what the actual differences are, especially in terms of min and avg fps, as the 870m still seems to have the advantage of higher min fps, which of course aren't unimportant.

To me personally i especially would like to ask for Crysis 3 as in ephesix's video his fps surprised me quite a bit...
He explained that here and i know that Crysis 3 is a very very demanding game and maybe i had wrong expectations, but if you could reproduce notebookcheck's benchmark sequence (check out the video) once with stock clocks and once with your OC monitoring your min, max and avg fps both times, that would be very appreciated..

Liked and subscribed

 

I just ordered one with base configuration so no ssd and 2gb vram. Can you buy a plate for 2.5" ssd to replace the DVD drive?
Kinda worried I made a mistake, hearing a lot of people saying it has bad build quality and is noisy with flexy keyboard.

 

This laptop doesn't have a DVD drive.

 

Awesome video man. I will be purchasing one of these in the next week or two along with a monitor to game on or use for school. Do you have any recommendations for an external monitor. Preferably a larger display.

 

Hey guys I am a student looking to purchase a slim laptop.

I am soon going to purchase this laptop but I had a few questions.

I am going to be purchasing the one with the largest battery, so battery life (14.8V, 63.64Wh) will be improved. I dont really game too hard but once in a while I like to play games. Are the fans really that loud when just browsing the web etc? I dont want people to be bothered in lecture halls/library. Would there be a better choice for me instead?

Thank you for your answers

ALSO:

How much difference is 14.8V, 63.64Wh vs 15.2V, 61.25Wh?
and is not having a 2.5' drive a really big deal? Thanks

 

Oh Scan might have wrong spec listed then.
Means I cant use the 2.5" SSD I bought unless I replace the HDD in it which I need. Guess I better guy a mSATA drive and return the 2.5".
Thanks

 

I do not believe the options for larger batteries are readily available, so you may not have the choice that you want. All shipped units worldwide that I have seen have had the 47 wh battery.

The only version with the 61.25wh battery appears to be the rebranded, XMG C404.

I have not seen the extended 63.64wh battery (which assumably extends its length to block the 2.5" drive) in any actually shipped units, only on the gigabyte specifications page.

The best option would obviously be the 61.25 version, which appears to leave the 2.5" drive accessible, but without purchasing the rebranded XMG version of the device there does not currently appear to be any way to get your hands on either of the larger capacity batteries.

 

I repasted with IC Diamond 7 last night, results 5~6'C dropped~ Very satisfied ^_^
And took few photos when repasting: