NEW Gigabyte P34 V2

For those who haven't already seen: GIGABYTE P34Gv2 - Video Review by XOTIC PC - YouTube

Thanks to XoticPC for this very informative review. :thumbsup:

 

Hi All,

I'm looking to purchase this laptop for 3D-modelling and software development. I've noticed that a couple of people went from MBP to the Gigabyte. So a few questions to them:

1) How is the screen compared to Retina? Would it be enough for photo editing?
2) How is the build quality and general look-and-feel compared to MacBook? I thought it wasn't important for me, but nevertheless, in your opinion, is p34g looks "cheap" or "OK"?
3) What is the boot time? In XoticPC review (message above) the boot time is almost 30 sec. I consider this unacceptable for SSD.
4) Is back cover a finger print magnet? How easy are they removed?

Thx in advance

 

No, the removal of the mSATA ssd is not necessary. Once Windows 8 is on the Samsung ssd, restart the machine. At this point windows 8 will exist on both drives and it will likely boot onto the mSATA. However, we are going to change that. Go into BIOS and change the boot order to Samsung ssd first. Then it will boot to Samsung and you can format the mSATA

 

So what's the difference? Workstations have always been used as gaming laptops in the past. I've always had workstations, but all manufacturers have now gone done the wrong path (ULV processors). I strongly think of this P34g v2.

What's awful: no stereo input (really every manufacturer is going down that stupid combo-port path) and bad keyboard layout. But that's exactly what HP and Dell and Lenovo are doing to their formerly good machines - on top of a weak processor.

Can anyone with a non-intel wifi card please confirm that they can freely set their MAC address?

 

does anybody know if they will ever sell the bigger battery version in the US?

 

Hello everyone.

Just following up on my experience so far. Tested both Bioshock Infinite and BF4 yesterday and the results are in (Room Temps were 26-27C):

1. Bioshock Infinite (All settings Maxed out): 45+ FPS: GPU temps went up to 71C CPU went up to 91C (!)
2, Battlefield 4 (All settings maxed out except FXAA set to 4): 30+FPS GPU: 72C CPU: 91C

The fans under load can be quite audible, but nothing that would be loud enough to be an issue (at least for me). I am a little concerned about the CPU temps, but the GPU seems to stay nice and cool. The keyboard never got hot (but it did get warm, which is honestly, understandable), and the top-center of the bottom (where the CPU and GPU is located) does tend to get hot (near about 50C).

Haven't got the time to test the battery yet, will post my findings when I do. The metal finish is not Brushed metal (as some images floating on the net would have you believe), but more of a solid off-white finish. The back of the lid is also metal (as far as I can tell), but is dark blue-ish in tint (rather than black).

Overall this is a gaming beast and I am very happy with (knock on wood) it thus far. Good things do come in small packages!

 

Thank you, Hasib for your feedback.
The temperatures of the gpu are surprisingly good! Low 70s... not bad!! Very similar values on cpu and gpu on Xotic's Review (see link in my post #351).
I wished the temps would be more balanced though, over 90 °C on CPU isn't ideal, while low 70s on the gpu would offer a significantly headroom for higher, but still not risky temps ( ~low 80s).

A question to you, Hasib as well as the other owners of the P34G v2 so far:
Can you confirm the jumping fan characteristics which can be seen in XoticPC's benchmarking section of the video review while gaming?
The fan constantly going from low rpm to mid stage and then on max fan noise just to fall after a couple of seconds back on low fan noise to repeat this behaviour again, seems to be annoying (at least for me).

If yes, would there be any possibilities to lock the fan on the mid stage while gaming?
In my opinion the max stage is quite loud and maybe wouldn't even be neccessary, if the fan wouldn't always fall back on the low stage, which makes the temps rising and therefore activating the max fan stage...

If not and you have a constant fan stage, which is it? Maximum stage or the second highest?

 

The Fan does change on the fly (very quick response times!). You can lock it into Stealth mode (low). Other options are Auto and Turbo (expect low whizzing noise!)

For gaming, I set the fan to Turbo and put on my headphones Given the High CPU temps, best not to take chances. Also, I believe the Fan kicks into High as temps start reaching the high 80s. Although it reached 92C today with BF4 (Room temps are still 25-26) it tends to hover around 87-89C mark while gaming.

 

Holy crap, that GPU temp is amazing! Can't wait to start overclocking it. You have almost 20 degrees headroom!!!!

By the way, max temperature for CPU to be healthy is 100 degrees. Anything lower than that and you should be more then ok. If it craps out, warranty replacement! But it shouldn't, most i7's in gaming laptops run is 90 degree range just fine. In the desktop world 60 is considered too hot, but laptops have completely different operating thresholds.

 

Hi all,

I also just got my P34G v2 yesterday and thought I'd share some feedback. It's the base model ordered it XoticPC (via Amazon). I'm not huge into benchmarks, temp recording and all that, but hopefully this feedback will be helpful to some people. I apologize it's so long, but I've blocked out the sections if you're only interested in certain things.

Background
I'm a very happy Mac user who has a 13" MacBook Pro with Retina display. I don't have a great deal of time to play games (wife and two young kids), but I got back into it a bit when Titanfall came out. I don't much care for FPS gaming on consoles, so I bought it for PC. I read some reports that the game runs pretty decent with the Iris graphics in the MBP, so I loaded up W7 via bootcamp and installed the game. I have to keep all settings at the bare minimum and I was averaging about 27 FPS. Playable, but not ideal. With a new-found interest in games, I started to look into gaming notebooks.

To be honest, I went into this with the idea that I'd probably end up sticking with Mac in the long run. There are some programs that I use regularly that are only available for Mac, and I just find OSX so nice to work with. I do use a Windows 7 PC at work, and have no problem with PCs in general, I just really like the display, aesthetics and build quality of the MBPs. I heard about the new Razer Blade coming out and thought if anything could dethrone the Mac, that would probably be it. I pre-ordered it from Amazon on April 7 and the wait began.

I've been following the Razer board closely and hearing about all the shipping delays with pre-orders from Razor's site. Based on the backlog over there, I assumed it would be quite a while before I got my Blade from Amazon. Plus, I use Adobe programs extensively for work and side projects, and I heard that they currently don't scale well on the 3k displays. This had me worried, so I started looking into alternatives. Someone was selling a 2013 Razer Blade on another forum for a good price, so I thought I'd give that a try first. It's still fairly powerful by today's standards and has a good enough video card to play Titanfall at high settings. My concern was the screen. I mean, how bad could it really be? Absymal, that's how bad. I liked the system overall, but coming from a Retina display, I just couldn't stomach it. Luckily, I bought it at a good price and was able to make a small profit for it on eBay. Not a great start to my laptop search.

I then immediately landed on the MSI GS60 Ghost Pro with the 1080p screen. It had gotten good reviews, was light for its size, and was about $600 cheaper than the new Blade I ordered. Newegg has a new "preferred account" that allows you to return things with no restocking fee, so I figured I'd give it a shot. When I got it, I just found it to be overwhelmingly large and unwieldy. It wouldn't even fit in my backpack. I decided that I needed a 14" or smaller notebook and sent it back the next day. At that point I had decided that I'd probably just hold on to my Mac and see how the new Blade was when it arrived. It was then that I discovered the P34G v2. XoticPC apparently also offers a no-questions-asked return policy, so I figured what the heck and ordered one.

Initial Impressions
So again, I figured that this machine was really going to have to blow me away in order for me to keep it. My biggest concerns were fan noise, screen quality, touch pad, battery life and overall build quality. I unboxed it and was taken aback by the size of the power brick. It's pretty big, but at least it's somewhat thin and doesn't seem too heavy. As for the laptop itself, I'm actually fairly impressed with the build quality. It looks and feels pretty solid. I'm not noticing a lot of flex on the keyboard or screen. It's got ugly stickers all over it (including a big one in the upper-right corner that says "Made in Taiwan"), and the hinges are ugly, but overall, it looks and feels pretty good (yes, I know the stickers can be removed). It's also quite thin and light for it's size. It doesn't feel significantly heavier than my 13" rMBP. So far, so good.

First Boot, Windows, Installed Software and Trackpad
I'm not a huge fan of Windows 8. I had a Surface Pro for about six months and started to get used to it a little more, but I still really prefer the Windows 7 style desktop. It was a nice touch that Gigabyte has it boot to the desktop by default. I still have trouble finding things easily, but I'm starting to get the hang of the keyboard shortcuts now and the transition is smoother.

First thought, wow, this screen looks pretty good! It's no retina display, but it's leaps and bounds better than the 2013 Razer Blade. Colors are crisp, text is clean and the viewing angles seem very good. Gigabyte has the scaling set at 150% to start, which was a little big. I scaled it down to 125% and it's comfortable to me now. I do have a weird issue with the screen though. There's a little "circle" of screen towards the lower middle that is a little lighter in color than the rest. It probably encompasses about 10-15 pixels total and is only noticeable on light colored backgrounds. The strange part is if I tilt the screen forward and hold it, it disappears. But as soon as I let go of the screen again, it comes back. It's very odd. Again, it's not super noticeable so I'm not sure if I'm going to do anything about it yet, but it is concerning. I attached a couple of photos, but it's really hard to see in the pictures.





As for bloatware, there's none really to speak of. There are some Gigabyte utilities that to be honest, I probably don't need, but I actually find them pretty useful. There's a simple control widget that allows you to set the fan speeds, control brightness, volume, power options and some other functions. It's unobtrusive, and I don't think it does anything to performance. There's also a backup utility, and some software that checks your drivers for newer versions. Again, they are unobtrusive and actually useful in my opinion. The Office trial was installed, which I didn't mind because I was going to install it anyway. There's also PowerDVD, Norton Security, and a LAN optimizer, which I probably will uninstall, but definitely nothing major.

Finally, the trackpad. No Windows laptop I've ever used can compare to a Mac's trackpad, and this one is definitely no exception. Out of the box, the drivers installed do not allow for two-finger tap for right-click. The scrolling is sluggish and the movement is quite a bit slower than I want. Two finger scroll worked decent, but it was jumpy and just didn't feel right. I did some research on the Elan touchpad drivers and found some people saying that some Samsung branded drivers work pretty well. I managed to find those drivers and installed them. I now have many more options in my trackpad control panel, including two-finger right click and some other things. It also feels smoother and more responsive. Overall, it's still nowhere near as good as the Mac trackpad, but it is manageable with the right drivers and some tweaking.

Brief Gaming Experience and Fan Noise

So, after loading up some software, it's time to try some Titanfall. I'm embarrassed to admit that it's the only game I own right now. I max out everything with 4x AA and 16x AF just to see how it does. Very impressive! I averaged about 50 FPS at these settings and the game looked phenomenal. This is also my first experience with the fans. They are virtually silent when the machine is idle or if you're just doing basic surfing/word processing, so I hadn't really noticed them. They do come on quietly on occasion if you're installing a program or doing something relatively processor intensive, but they are very quiet overall. This came as a nice surprise to me. While gaming, they definitely ramped up, but they never did get to the highest level (which you can hear anytime you want using the Gigabyte control utility). Granted, I only played for about 15 minutes, but I was pleasantly surprised by the fan noise.

Issues and Unscientific Battery Life Observations
Before leaving work yesterday, I copied over some fonts that I need for graphics work from my Mac. I chose not to overwrite any fonts that were already installed, but I still somehow managed to corrupt my system fonts. All the Windows icons were just showing as little rectangles, and the system font was showing as wingdings. I couldn't read any menus or basically do anything. I took the laptop home (without the AC Adapter). I spent about two hours Googling and troubleshooting trying to get the fonts working again. I was close at one point, but now my menus were showing a tiny script font. I gave up and decided to restore. I hit F9 on bootup and chose to reinstall Windows. I thought I was going to have to install all the drivers from the Gigabyte site but was happy to see that it appeared to restore it to factory specs. This took about 20 minutes to do.

Once it was back up and running, I spent about another hour or so playing around, surfing, and installing software again. At this point, battery life was down to 22% and said I had less than an hour left. For about two-thirds of this time, I had the laptop in power saver mode with the brightness at 30%. For the other third (before I realized it), it was in high performance mode with screen brightness at 80%. So to summarize, I surfed the net for about 2 hours, reinstalled Windows for about 20 minutes, and surfed the web for about another hour. At this point, battery life said I had 52 minutes left. I estimate under light usage, you'll get about 3.5-4.5 hours out of the battery. Again, this is about as unscientific as it gets, but hopefully it gives you an idea.

Final Thoughts
Overall, I'm quite happy with this laptop. It honestly exceeds my expectations in most ways. The "light" area of the screen has me worried, but that's probably just a flaw with my particular laptop. If I decide I'm going to get rid of my Mac and replace it with this, I'll probably contact XoticPC about getting it fixed or getting a replacement. I can't decide if I should keep my Razer Blade order open and test it out too, but I probably will just to cover all the bases. For $900 less than the Blade (I ordered the 256GB version), this machine is more than capable. It also has more storage and upgrade options. It also comes with a two-year warranty instead of the standard one-year, though I can't speak for Gigabyte customer service. I hear it's spotty whereas Razer's is supposedly very good. We'll see what happens.

Thanks for reading and let me know if there are any questions I can answer for you!

 

Hello everybody.
Does someone know some competitve european shops already selling this laptop?

 

What touchpad drivers did you end up using? Link? Thanks!

 

Samsung branded 11.7.8.5. There's now a Samsung logo in my touchpad settings area, which is a little weird, but the drivers do work well and offer more options.

Here's the direct link to download: http://goo.gl/Uwhgvj

Note that I didn't post these so they could probably be removed at any time. Here's a link to the thread that references them. Here is the specific post.

 

Overclockers in the UK will have it at the end of May to ship beginning of June, or so they told me today.

A couple of weeks ago Scan UK told me they didn't yet have a date, was going to ask them again today.

Alternate.de in Germany have it up on their website but I don't speak German so I'm not sure if it says when they'll be shipping.

 

I'm from germany ^^ it just says that you can preorder it ;p

 

How much would it cost? Would you expect its price to reduce after it its the market?

 

Can anybody ask some further detail to alternate? It is not evident when and what exactly they are going to ship

 

It's actually quite clear, it was posted earlier: link

You don't need to know German, just scroll down to see the list with specifications.

 

For the people with 90 degree CPUs, is that with ic diamond pasted or not?

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

thank you for the link

 

Mine came with the default thermal paste. Will repaste in a year or so, once the original starts deteriorating.

 

Thanks for this, these are working MUCH better than the drivers it came with. Also great write up.

 

What's improved? Two finger scrolling I hope!

 

Is this laptop coming in barbone, without HDD, SSD, memory, windows?

 

There is the German model which comes with freedos and no SSD for 200 less (which would be perfect for me... except I'm not German and do not reside in Germany). The link is a page back, bottom.

 

ssds will not drop to that cheap. they are already pretty cheap atm, the manufacturing/marketing cost will not allow companies to sell 500gb worth of nands for 100dollars.

samsung evo 500gb for 250 is a steal. id buy it if amazon shipped canada.

 

Oh yes it will, people said that about EVERY piece of tech. One day, a 500gb SSD will be as worthless as a floppy disk. It's all a matter of time. In 2 years, ssd prices will definitely be lower. It is also likely that SATA 4 is coming in 2-3 years so SATA 3 will be way cheaper

 

Anyone else have backlight bleed at the top of your screen? Its only noticeable on black scenes, and if you push/squeeze the screen (I was just checking to see if the bezel was loose or anything and noticed that made it worse)

Just wanted to be sure that's normal on other P34Gv2's. Aside from that the screen looks great.

 

have ram prices gone down in recent years? no. ssd was a new tech and the price came down rapidly in recent years but it wont go to the price range you are talking about unless theres some breakthrough with nands. and you better hope the quality remains decent unlike hard-drives

and prices dont always drop. ram for one has gone up lol. 8gb for 90bux DAMN MANNNNNN.

 

Ya, but it all depends on demand. If PCI-e ssd catch on (and they will) then SATA drives will drop in demand and price.RAM is DDR3 for a looong time, and it's a necessary component so they can really do what they want with it. I remember the first desktop I build was with a 8gtb stick which I got on newegg for 44.99 with free shipping NON-sale price....

 

sata will remain dominant for a long long time. pci-e ssd already failed, look at the ocz product that nobody bought. the response time is the reason why ssd just pooped all over harddrives in term of loading speed etc, bandwidth is not an issue to normal consumers. if you want to have mega fast read/write get a fusion io drive, my friend spent 15k on one and he loaded hon 2s faster than mine intel g2 lol.

 

So far overall performance in general is better. I'm not getting the annoying jumping around when trying to scroll or scrolling in the wrong direction. Also the odd cursor twitching when I stop the cursor to lift up my finger to tap is no longer present. And more settings options that are nice.

 

Apple sells more than a million notebooks with PCI-E SSDs a year, and that's just one manufacturer. It's certainly not dead.

PCI-E in the M.2 form factor will be what high-end manufacturers move towards in the future.

 

Can anyone with a P34g-v2 comment on the screen quality? How does it hold up to a true IPS? what is the contrast ratio? how are the blacks?

thanks!

 

and how many sata drives were sold.........

 

Hi guys im new this forum. Im planning to buy a new laptop right now and after quite a long research time ive decided between two laptops which is gigabyte p34gv2 or the msi ge60 apache pro, for now im more towards the gigabyte since this laptop have only one issue for me which is the design look like an average laptop, im hoping for some help to decide thisespecially from the owner themself what are the minus and plus from gigabyte laptop.if u guys have any other suggestion for another laptop be my guest . Thanksss , cheers guys

 

These laptops are in two different categories... If thinness and light-weight is important to you, then the Gigabyte is the clear winner. As for it's design, I much prefer simple then "look at my cool LED's and flashy stuff". I much prefer it to be simple looking (though well built) as I dont need everyone around me looking at flashy laptops. Not to mention how stupid it would look in a meeting/school.

 

Hello,

yesterday my gs60 arrived which I will return after the 14-day returning period (here in germany). The resaon for returning can be found in the fan noise in idle, it is really annoying. Normal 2900 rpm -> Fan Control by Pherein -> Decrease to 2600 rpm "but" when the cpu temperature reaches certain degree (about 47) the fan is kicked on for just a few seconds really loud. That's a deal breaker!!!!

Now I wanted to know, if there is a noticeable fan in the p34g in idle state or problems in jumping to higher rotation after reaching a certain cpu temperature for just a few seconds? fan speed should be proportional to cpu temperature, how could this be so difficult for manufacturers?!

 

well personally is there any cons do u think for this lapttop?

 

To answer a few questions:

The laptop design seems plain compared to the razer or Ghost Pro, but feature wise is it amazing.

The only con I see is that the IPS screen has a little backlight bleedthrough noticeable on full black screens.

The GPU temps stay low, it plays games at FullHD perfectly, and can even be OC'd to 870M levels and stay cooler doing so.

I personally removed the 2.5" drive, upgraded the msata to a 500GB, and added another 8GB ram to it.

I think for the price, its the best thin and light gaming option out. Build quality is good, not great. The frame itself is sturdy, touchpad is fine.

Screen colors are great. Viewing angles are fantastic, and blacks are definitely black. I couldn't beat a certain part of Metro 2033 on my 2013 Razer blade because I could see a few guys shooting me in the dark well, and this made it very clear and I finally moved on because I could see them lol.

 

Would someone who has one of these mind checking in the bios for an option to disable the dedicated graphics card? Supposedly the first version of this laptop had this option and if it can do it as well that would make running Linux on it a breeze.

 

I had the gs60 pro for a week and had the same fan issue. The p34 on silent is actually completely silent.

 

ThAnks for ur info, about the drive, can i replace it with samsung evo840 500gb? Im sorry im not really understand about ssd type and size, and also u previously have gs60 msi?is it bad?

 

Nice to hear. I just took paint to create a Temp-Fan chart showing the fan issue with the GS60.


Explanation:
This chart (x-axis with Temperature and y-axis with fan speed in %) shows the possibilities with a Fan Control Program. The blue point is a fix point, following only the left box with the green graphs are configurable. You can set the fan speed to 0% until the cpu reaches about 47°C, where the fan starts spinning with 50%, even if the temperature is just one second higher than 47°C. The blue point should be movable downwards to the fan speed of 35% while using the computer idle.

Now another question:
Can such a point be found in the configuration of fans in the p34gv2?

 

Have you seen signs of image persistence on gray backgrounds?

 

So XoticPC just put up the P34Gv2- CF2 on their site today...

All specs are exactly the same, except for the CPU:

CF1: i7-4700HQ (up to 3.40 GHz)
CF2: i7-4710HQ (up to 3.50 GHz)

The price for both is exactly the same as well... And I just ordered the CF1 a few days ago... *facepalm*
I'm guessing the new CPU is not that big of a difference? I'm not a super expert on these.

 

.1 GHz probably won't make or break anything, but I would contact xotic and they will probably hook you up with the newer model

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Yeah didn't think it would be that big of a difference.
Update: Looks like the CF1 is now $1459; CF2 is the original $1499. No more free RAM upgrade to 12GB. I must've been one of the last to get it. I can be happy with what I paid considering the extra RAM, which is more useful than the extra GHz.

Another question: Is the stock wireless card worth upgrading? If so, would anyone be able to recommend a good/compatible card to upgrade with? The stock card is an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 802.11 a/b/g/n. Not sure if this is mediocre, or what.

I'll be using this laptop a bunch for work while traveling, and good internet service is essential to my work. I've stayed in lots of guesthouses/hostels with crappy wi-fi, and I want to make sure I can have it working as good as possible (at least on my end). So I'd want the best possible signal strength and range - don't necessarily need any special spec for online gaming (meaning SPEED itself is not the main thing). I've seen stuff about signal repeaters and such, but it'd obviously be easier to not have to carry another peripheral around. If the stock card is very good as-is, I'll just use that. Thanks guys.

 

What's everyone doing for Diablo III?

It gets stuck on the integrated chip and you can't force it to use the nVidia card AT ALL.

Stuck using integrated graphics. >< - Forums - Diablo III

Seems to have been an issue for 2 months now

 

The XOTICPC review/unboxing on youtube goes through the bios screens if you'd like to check.

Optimus isn't incredibly easy to use, but I've gotten it working in fedora and debian... years ago. It must be in a better state by now. Once you get it up and going, you can just turn off the card in linux...