Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Perhaps they've tweaked the QHD's (yours came early), but there are no artifact issues with it. I have a few clusters of dark pixels, but they're minor and with in-office service, I'll have it fixed by a tech once part shortages diminish. Viewing angles are good.. better than most IPS, though not as good as top level IPS like our reference displays have. Those displays also cost more than the M3800 did

Fingerprints are hardly noticeable. Clean every 2 hours, come on. Did you just eat a cheeseburger?

Perhaps you just didn't want to be happy with it. You were complaining about the font on the keyboard...

 

I'm quite pleased with mine. Win8.1 is very nice, I don't understand the complaints. I watched this video and everything made sense: The Missing Windows 8 Instructional Video - Who moved my Windows 8 Cheese? - YouTube It's based on 8 - 8.1 allows you to boot to desktop and returned the start button.

Most issues folks are having are because hi dpi was uncommon in the windows world until very recently. You will want to use 8.1 if you are going multi monitor. For the most part, it works quite well and there are temporary workarounds until Adobe fixes their issues.

 

I had a xps 17 l702x before. And never had any issues with it. I was really looking forward to this m3800 that's why I ordered it the day it was available.
The build quality was really great and with a business font it would have been 'perfect' the font was no show stopper but it's questionable. The notebook check guys agree btw.

I was working with Photoshop most of the time. With that dark image backdrop and rather dark image the were noticeable trails.

As I paid 4000 euro for cs 5.5 and the cs6 upgrade I really tried to love this machine as these licenses aren't valid on a Mac.

 

I assume you have the 500gb hybrid drive. How slow it that to boot and open programs with? Will you swap it for an ssd?

 

Yes, I have an Intel model 530 SSD (480GB) on the way, as well as another 8GB RAM SIMM to up the memory to 16GB.
The Hybrid is surprisingly fast, but for what I do, there is no substitute for having a true SSD.

 

I got my M3800 yesterday. So far I'm reasonably happy. They keyboard isn't really better than my M4400. I prefer the slightly longer key travel of the older model and without question the more complete layout. The trackpad is worlds better than that on the M4400 (not a good part of the older model). It really seems to work as well as any of the Apple track pads I recall using. Still, I will be using a mouse most of the time.

The screen is really nice though I can tell which parts aren't scaled as well as others. It does bother me when some text is blurry due to scaling. On my older computers I've set all text to modes that avoid smoothing. Sure that means a more jagged edge but I'd rather have a sharp edge on which to focus. I like the touch screen.... I hate the glare. Matte for all my non-touch screens.

So about the power adapter. I've picked up a spare from Dell... it was $40 for the adapter, I was expecting more like $100. Still, I recall it was mentioned that an old to new style power plug would be available. Does anyone know were to get the adapter that lets you use the old Dell power packs with the new, smaller plug? Thanks for all the great info in this thread. It helped when I was making my choice.

 

Here: Dell DC Power Dongle for Dell XPS 12/ XPS 13/ XPS 13 MLK System : Connected Classroom | Dell (disregard the fact that it doesn't list this system or 130W; I have one and it works perfectly fine.)

And wow, that's a much better AC adapter price than I was expecting, especially from Dell as opposed to eBay. Which one did you buy? The one I can find actually intended for this system is only $35 (but that wouldn't require the dongle), but the regular-style 130W adapter is $90....wonder if they'll fix that discrepancy since the former is actually a better unit given that the brick is smaller; the only benefit to the latter is the longer power cord, but that's hardly worth $55. Unfortunately people whose laptops have the traditional connector style wouldn't be able to use the cheaper, smaller adapter since there's no dongle I know of to take the mini connector on the AC adapter and adapt it to the regular style connector on a laptop.

 

Just noticed one improvement on A02 BIOS update that I'm thrilled about: If the lid is closed, the machine will now output to the external display starting from POST!! This means you can tweak BIOS settings, enter preboot whole disk encryption passwords, run Windows Recovery environment, watch Windows start, etc without having to use the built-in panel. Before, my external display never lit up until the Windows logon screen. I have both a DisplayPort and HDMI display connected, and it used the DisplayPort-connected panel. That happens to be my primary display in Windows, but I doubt that matters during boot.

Strangely though, I originally noticed that while my USB keyboard worked to press F2 or F12 to enter the BIOS or boot selection interface, it would then become unusable IN those interfaces. I then went into the BIOS and set USB Emulation to Disabled (not the default setting), and then it started working in those areas. I would've expected it would have been the other way around (i.e. it would have been disabled, and I'd need to enable it to make a USB keyboard work in those environments), but ok. The one catch is that you can't boot off of USB devices when USB Emulation is disabled, so you'll have to remember to toggle that option when you want to do so.

Lastly, on the Dell boot splash screen, when it's displayed on my external panel I get this weird color noise on the lower half of the display, except where the little circular dots animation runs. That goes away as soon as the Dell splash screen goes away in favor of anything else though (BIOS, boot selection, whatever), so I don't really care. Maybe that will be fixed in BIOS A03.

And incidentally, unrelated to this update, I just noticed that my USB boot flash drive isn't selectable for UEFI boot when I have another USB cable attached, regardless of the USB Emulation setting. That cable attaches to my display's USB hub, which in turn has my keyboard, mouse receiver, webcam, and printer all attached, and I was too lazy to figure out which of those devices caused the issue. Just an fyi.

 

Have there been any BIOS updates for the m3800? Or is it just for the XPS 15?

 

M3800 got it as well:
ftp://ftp.dell.com/published/Pages/precision-m3800-workstation.html

Along with new Intel video, Nvidia(*), Wifi, Bluetooth, and SATA drivers.

(* the nvidia driver -- 331.65 -- already got pushed via Windows update.)

No improvement in game scaling that I can see with the new video drivers