Dell Precision M3800 - 2013!

Doubtful that you'll be able to have two SSDs unless one of them is mSATA. (Not sure if it has mSATA yet, but the max drive there is currently 500GB.) I highly doubt that there will be room for two 2.5" drives inside --- M4800 doesn't even have this unless you remove the optical drive, and M3800 doesn't have an optical drive.

 

Yup. No dual hard drive option on M4800... doesn't it seem a bit strange? If even consumer notebooks can be fitted with 2 hard drives.

And storage space maxes out at 256 for their SSD...

 

M4800 supports a 2.5" standard drive, a msata drive and I think you can use a third drive in the optical bay with the optical drive hdd caddy.

As for the M3800, there is a chance it can support two drives by two methods.

1) Have a 2.5" bay and a msata slot.

2) Have two msata slots like the Razer Blade.

 

So FHD and 3200x1800 are supposed to come as touch. Which would be better?

 

Personally, I would go with the higher resolution. It would allow for more applications to be fit on the screen. You can always increase the DPI from windows if things are too small anyways. I think the QHD+ screen will also have a higher color gamut and better contrast ratio.

 

Depends on how Windows 8.1 scaling in RTM is really. If you follow 'Retina' mode, then it's 2:1 - i.e. a virtual 1600 x 900 screen, and it's pretty much guaranteed that the screen will look razer-sharp. For better virtual resolutions like 1920 x 1080 or anything above that, results will depend heavily on the quality of scaling.

It's interesting and again, predictable that pubs have criticised Windows 8.1 scaling for not having enough control - when they raved over OS X Retina and it's grand total of three modes.

So I'm expecting Windows 8.1 scaling control to be at least slightly superior to OS X for the simple reason that ****-for-brains Applezombies didn't like it because it doesn't have an Apple logo on it and they were simply doing their darndest to pick holes in it, but I don't do betas and haven't bothered to download the MSDN images yet, so have no direct experience of 8.1 yet.

However even if non-2:1 scaling quality is iffy as OS X, you can still expect better scaling for virtual FHD than a Macbook Pro Retina. So I'd say go for QHD+.

 

This is certainly the case with the M4700. I'm sure enthusiasts can find a way to order the mounting hardware separately and you should be aware that if you order the base unit you may not get the relevant mounting hardware. But in situations like this I usually just order the machine fully configured, then toss (or retain for warranty) the smaller SSD's / HDD and jam in bigger ones after it arrives.

 

The scaling in 8.1 is done either the same way (using the percentages like in 8) or using a slider. I'm hoping this will be enough to fix scaling issues. If not, I'm hoping they release some update to do it. The M3800 will most likely come with 8.1 from the factory.

Looking at the M4800 manual, It will have at least the 2.5 and msata option. Hopefully when the customizable configurations are available we'll see if there's a third bay option.

 

Take a look at the reviews of the 8.1 preview. It looks like scaling works pretty well for everything MS in 8.1, some third party devs will find a way to screw that up somehow I'm sure (and then people will complain that the culprit is windows, again). Complaints I've seen about scaling in 8.1 pertained to multiple monitor setups with different scaling settings.

As for 1 HDD and mSATA in the M4700/M4800, it's actually pretty common fare, it's the dual 2.5" 15" laptops that are rarer.

 

In 8.1 you can now select scaling individually per monitor or you can setup a global scaling setting for all of the monitors to follow. So those people with issues on multiple monitors should also no longer have issues.