Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

My Dell M3800 has definitly a issue with power handling. I use it with two original Dell power supplies. First I recognized a disturbing noise if I plug the power supply in, but that only happened sometimes. Than I recoginized problems with loading up the battery and sometimes it switched to battery mode altough it was plugged in. I will call Tech Support tomorrow because the battery doesn't load anymore

 

It 'best to mount an ssd 2.5 "or a mSATA SSD? MSATA gives me some performance benefit? Enough for me to only one storage unit.

Thanks for the info!

 

For any SSDs where the same model is available in both 2.5" and mSATA (there aren't a lot) then performance will be identical because mSATA and SATA are just different physical sizes of the same connector with the same capabilities. mSATA will obviously be lighter by a tiny amount, but if you'll be getting an M3800 spec that has both connectors available since you'll have the smaller battery, buy whatever SSD meets your needs regardless of the connector type. New SSDs will continue to be released in both form factors if you want to upgrade/expand later.

 

On a minor note, I just got a ship notice for the power adapter that was "backorderd until January." Supposed to be here Tuesday, now, which will be ahead of the machine.

The machine is intended to be user serviceable; unless you accidentally damage something while doing it, swapping out the drives for another model does not effect your warranty.

(While it's rarely cost effective to do so, if you buy the new drive as a Dell-branded model, from Dell, the new drive will usually be covered under your machine warranty.)

For the past 7 years up until (and partially including this machine), my MO has been to order machines with the cheapest drive available, put it in a drawer so I have a copy of the original Dell image around (and on machines with return to depot service, something that can go back to Dell with the machine) and then putting my own drive (7200RPM back in the day, SSD today.)

Never a problem when the machines needed warranty or ADP (CompleteCare) service.

On this machine, am planning to keep the mSATA drive (almost ordered it without, but the cost was comparable to the 3rd-party drive I'd have bought, and the slight speed loss for LiteON over Intel wasn't worth the trouble) but to swap the 500gb HHD for a 2nd SSD.

There's no direct driver from Intel? I've generally been running those on other Optimus-equipped Dell machines, without problem.

Not that it fixes all problems; there are a lot of tweakables in the Nvidia and ATI drivers that are fixed on Intel (most notably I wish one could change the dithering mode or turn it off on 6-bit panels... the m3800 is an 8-bit panel, right???)

In the prerelease one I got to play with, there was no way to turn Optimus off and go to Nvidia-only in the BIOS, but for those with production ones it might be worth checking, as the scaling mode might then work better and/or be controllable in the Nvidia control panel app.

 

Your killing me. This is what I did: a 1600x900 PX PNG with a 1 PX pattern. Used it as desktop background. Doubled the size of that image used it as desktop background. On is sharp the other blurry. It's not because of the resolution it's weird scaling.

 

Nice test. So, you get antialiasing for free, and you complain?

If you try the same with an Ubuntu live USB stick you may be able to check if it is an issue of the OS+driver or the graphics card+screen.

 

Actually it's pointless as it is based on a raster graphic. But the Fonts in Thunderbird etc. look blurry to. I did and even more sophisticated test. I asked my Girlfriend which screen is better for reading: My old 17,3 inch FHD or the new with 1600x900px. She said it's the old FHD. I'll try the ubuntu thing, thats an idea.

edit: It's not pointless. I think it just the wrong upscaling. To stay in my Graphic Design Photoshop Vocabulary: They should use 'nearest neighbor' as upscaling algorithm.

 

Can someone kindly tell me about battery maintenance? When I get the unit should I let it power down right from the beginning to 0%? Generally, I believe I read not to have the unit plugged into the wall if the battery is 100%? is this correct? is it better to recharge at some certain level like not letting the battery drop below 25% if possible..as an example. Just looking for opinions from those that know how best to maintain batteries. Yes I can google the info but would like to hear some opinions from the community as well please. Thanks.

Also have a question about monitoring heating specifically related to the CPU and GPU in particular. Is there a utility or program (freeware) that would allow me to check the temps of both as I am running my programs? Not to push the units CPU and GPU but rather based on my own personal usage. So if I am working on it on a typical day i can run some kind of utility that will give me that kind of information in real time. It would also be good to keep track of temps over time if i could. Thanks.

Your feedback is most appreciated.

 

If I remove the storage unit sata hdd 2.5 ", I can buy an original Dell battery 91 Wh and mount? (I will boot from the mSATA SSD)
Do you know a link to buy Dell original parts? In the Italian store Dell can not find the battery.

 

There are different hardware-level variants of Optimus. Apparently systems with BIOS-level options for disabling the different GPUs have hardware switches/muxers so that both GPUs are connected to the outputs. That's not how this one is set up, which is why there's no BIOS option and so few options in the NVIDIA Control Panel. The drivers from Intel don't install on this system either.