Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Not sure about NFC, but on the WiGig/WiDi side, it's a question of which wireless card you go with. The Dell 1601 has WiGig and the Intel Card has WiDi.


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@alexhawker: Thank's a lot for your quick response. NFC is not that important, would just be good to know. In Germany it's only possible to configure the M3800 with the Intel card at the moment. But this makes me confident that I might be able to upgrade to WiGig in the future and use WiDi at the moment. (I was a bit confused about the stuff with the antennas written on DELL's homepage when upgrading an Intel card to the one from DELL.)

Cheers

 

NFC is definitely there. WiGig with the Intel card is definitely NOT, and as far as I know, that's the only Wifi card Dell is offering with it. I don't know whether you could install a WiGig-compatible card and have it work. It should, but I once tried 3 different Intel WiFi cards in another Dell laptop that used an NVIDIA motherboard chipset and all of them failed in different ways; I finally had to use a Broadcom Wifi card that worked.

As for WiDi, the Intel card supports it, but I don't see WiDi software as a download for 8.1, only 8.0 on other laptop models that use the same card. I don't know if that's because 8.1 has built-in support for WiDi, or Dell hasn't certified WiDi on 8.1 but Intel has a driver for it, or if Intel doesn't have a driver for it. Either way though, hardware support is there, so worst case you may have to wait for drivers to catch up.

The individual option is unchecking "Use one scaling level for all my displays", but you're right even that isn't as individual as it could be; it's only individual in that you set a general size you want and Windows can use different DPI modes on different displays to achieve that general size. Best results are achieved by setting your highest-DPI display as primary and then playing with it. Note that to see the full effect of changing the slider, you need to log off and back on. But I agree, when I use both my QHD+ internal panel and my regular 1200p external panel, I can't find a setting that looks fantastic on both. It's especially irritating because I want my external panel to be primary, and if I do that and set the scaling to what I like on that panel, everything on the QHD+ panel gets essentially zoomed in, which doesn't look great. Doing it the other way around causes high-res graphics to get scaled DOWN on my external panel, which looks better (though not as good as actually optimizing for that display), but I don't want to keep my QHD+ panel primary.

Your best option is to play with a 3-4 scaling options that Windows gives you and see what works best; just remember to log off and back on after making a change to see the full scope of the change.

 

Thanks! I will try that.

Has anyone figured out how to associate the play/pause etc. buttons(F4-F6) to another media player (i.e.VLC)?

 

Most media players should support media keys automatically. Nowadays, media keys are not system-specific, any app can hook in and deal with them properly. In VLC, you can configure them as keyboard shortcuts in the "hotkeys" section of preferences.

 

Check out this article that talks about multi-DPI settings in Windows 8.1, see if it helps:
Windows 8.1 DPI Scaling Enhancements

 

Wrote a long post and it deleted!

Here's the nutshell:

Looking at the m3800 and want to pull the trigger but I'm looking for any alternatives that have more of the features I look for (number pad with non-glossy screen and good battery life that haswell can bring). M3800 looks perfect but the lack of number pad and glossy screen kind of kill it a bit for me because of my work. I've found similar ultrabooks with good rez but they miss other features.

I've been looking at the razerblade pro (looks good but also no numberpad), the Gigabyte P35K (looks cheaply made, looking to spend $2k+), HP Envy Touchsmart 15/17 (way too thick at over an inch), and finally the Maingear Pulse 17. The Maingear looks very promising and it's the closest competitor to the m3800 however the 1080P screen and unknown battery life are holding me back.

I've scoured the net for "rumor threads" for ultrabooks that cellphones seem to have but I can't seem to find one central location for upcoming/current ultrabooks with organized features. Any help in that area would be great! Thanks very much!


EDIT: I just received a reply from Maingear stating the battery will last 3-6 hours depending on use. That's way too low for a Haswell at least for me!. Looks like the M3800 is back on top!

 

solo8:
First, you need to decide which features are important to you, and which are not.
If you need a hi-resolution 15" screen with 16GB of RAM in a light and thin body, then your choices are very limited.
If you can live with a smaller or lower-resolution screen, don't need that much RAM, or can sacrifice the portability, then there are a lot of other option available.
As for rumors, this forum is probably the best place to find any. Just wait a month or so for CES-2014 announcements.

 

That's true I think the number pad would be nice but not a necessity if I can get used to typing the numbers up on top of the keyboard. I think the M3800 is the closest to what I'm looking for so far with its great battery life for the size of the screen.

 

As I've said before, the downside to a number pad (and why most laptop manufacturers don't include them especially on 15.6" models) is that not only do relatively few people use them with any regularity, but when placed on a laptop, it shifts the main part of the keyboard to the left -- so the user is forced to either hold their hands at an off-center position (their right hand is even more off than the left) or sit off-center from the display. Neither of those is particularly desirable for most people. For those who use a numpad regularly, there are USB number pads. Obviously not as elegant as an integrated solution, but at least it keeps your hands properly positioned.