Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

My goal is to buy M3800 with HD screen, 8 gb ram, 500 gb hdd (boot win 8.1). Then I mount an mSATA ssd 256 gb and I boot windows 7 from mSATA. then use a 500 gb hdd to store.
As soon as the pc will ask about installing win 7 on mSATA if I have problems. Advice me some ssd 256 gb mSATA? The best..

 

Windows 7 won't have a problem installing to the mSATA drive as long as you set the BIOS option first (though it may already be set that way if the spec you're ordering doesn't include an mSATA cache unit). Worst case you MIGHT need to have the Intel Rapid Storage drivers available on a flash drive if the Windows 7 installer doesn't detect the drives at all because it doesn't have the right driver for this chipset's AHCI controller. Get the F6flpy version here just in case: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/De...apid+Storage+Technology+(Intel®+RST)&lang=eng.

As for the 256GB mSATA unit, there are a few popular options. I don't know what pricing or availability looks like for any of these in Italy, but all of these would be excellent and perform very close to each other:

Samsung 840 Evo (mSATA version just launched, would be my pick overall; uses TLC flash rather than MLC, though it also has an SLC TurboWrite cache to hide some of the inherent write performance penalty of TLC)
Crucial M500
Plextor/Lite-On M5M (the one that Dell ships if you order a 256GB mSATA unit from them)
Samsung SM841 (Dell ships a 512GB version of this; based on the 840 Pro but not officially available via retail, so it will be hard to find and it's expensive; also, since it's not a retail unit, that means Samsung firmware updates can't be installed onto it. If you buy one through Dell, technically any updates that Dell releases would be usable, but I don't know how that would work if you bought it somewhere else entirely)
Samsung PM841 (based on the 840 non-Pro or 840 Evo, not sure; uses TLC flash rather than the SM841's MLC; also not officially available via retail and hard to find, but less expensive than the SM841; same firmware problem though)

 

What is thread starter Bokeh doing? Preparing for a final review or just busy working ?

 

I have no issues running solidworks etc in win 8.1 on an M4800 if that helps.


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Ciao redbull,

I am also from Italy and, as other EU Countries, 512Gb mSata seems not to be an option.

About applications, although M3800 would be good at them, I am also carefully looking at the M4800 and the delayed Lenovo W540.
I think that with most CAD applications you may appreciate the quicker i7 4900MQ because they are still single threaded.

With FEA you will also get some more performance, but I think I am not willing to perform my calculations on a laptop: it is far less expensive to setup a custom server/desktop only for that.

Similar things for 3D modeling, but here the GPU could make some difference (there is a chance that neither the K2100 is enough, so you would have to move to the bulkier M6800, that offers much more in this sense).

Overall the M3800 is light and (kind of) stylish, compared to the M4800, and definitely to my M6400 that I have carried along for more than 4 years now.

M4800 could be the sweet spot, maybe.

Still undecided

Ciao

GB

 

Good displays appear warmer in tone than most screens. For some reason, many displays (especially on the consumer side) default to too bright and too blue which is much different than the intent of most visual content creators.

I have an M4500 which by default is far too blue, and I bet the same is true for your 4600. If the 3800 is more yellow that means it'll be easier to calibrate. Hooray!

Anyone who cares about color should be using a hardware screen calibrator to create monitor color profiles on a regular basis, no matter what display they use.

 

Intel 525 Series 240gb would be my recommendation. Intel has consistently had the best balance of reliability and performance, in my experience. A little pricy, though, at US prices; probably worse in Europe.

Samsung SM841/PM841 or Samsung EVO and Crucial M500 are all good drives if you don't have a write-heavy workload. The 840 Pros and 840 EVOs we have at my work have a really nasty habit of getting really slow on writes (~70-100MB/sec -- like disk speed -- for a while until garbage collection catches up) if you write to them heavily; we expected that for the EVO (given the SLC zoning technique) but not on the Pro. Crucial M500 just writes slowly to begin, although it seems a lot more consistent and never gets really slow.

 

Which version of SW are you using? Currently we are using 2013 but that is on Win7. I would love to order the m3800 with 8.1, but if I check the specs on the SW website, it says 8.1 isn't supported for 2013. Though not supported doesn't mean necessarily that it won't work.

 

I have both '13 and '14 installed. Haven't really been using '14 yet as I am still finishing up projects that were started in '13, just in case.


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This thread has kind of died out just when I thought it would pick up.