Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I need to go and read the XPS thread again. I want to see how they were able to throttle the CPU.

The only time I have seen any throttling was when I used a 90 watt adapter (using the step down dongle). Even then, it took MSI Kombuster + Prime95 to make it happen. With the 130 watt adapter that came with the M3800, overclocking the GPU to get closer to 750M clocks, and fully loading the CPU and GPU, the pull from the wall was around 110 watts with a fully charged battery. Heat was not an issue, but my office and home stay around 68F/20C year round. I need to run the battery down and see how much power the system will pull from the wall under full CPU and GPU load with the battery charging.

One thing I did notice was that the fans will lag behind the rising temps when you go from zero load and cold heat sinks to a full load on the CPU and GPU. I wrote about the temp behavior earlier in the thread.

Take it with a grain of salt, but I would be willing to bet that the M3800 has higher manufacturing tolerances than the XPS15. Just my guess.

BIOS updates could fix some of the XPS issues.

 

The CPU does not throttle at all, instead GPU can throttle in some situation. (I'm talking about XPS15)
There is a reliable review made by Notebookcheck:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-XPS-15-9530-Late-2013-Notebook.107485.0.html


Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

Will the SSDs supplied in the M3800 support TRIM “out of the box”, which I understand is very important for longevity of SSDs (I’m no expert)? I cannot find out any info on this, although I see some reports which hint at some problems in this regard with other systems in the past (to be clear, I don’t know if these past reports are accurate).

Will such TRIM support be equally available if one buys the XPS 15 through the business store (the XPS 15 has a 512GB SSD option on the UK site, but only 256GB for the M3800)?

 

That is much hotter than I see on the M3800. Interesting.

 

Uhm, I have posted link for German version of the review:
This is English version:
Review Dell XPS 15 (9530, Late 2013) Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

Hi all! I have been following the thread since the beginning and it has been super helpful in making a decision. The sticking point for me at this point is whether to order the m3800 with 8.1 or 7. Dell will let me order with either installed. I run SW13, PS5 and Illustrator. I have heard scaling is better with 8.1 but I am unsure. I will need photoshop to work and be usable with the icons. Any suggestions or preference? Thanks in advance.

 

TRIM will absolutely be supported no matter what spec you buy. It's been supported on SSDs for years. The new thing is hardware-level support for encryption, which doesn't seem to be available (but isn't widely available in the general market yet either).

That review did show abnormally high temperatures, and several people commented that they weren't seeing anything near those temps when the review was first published. But it's also become clear that this machine is very picky about its placement, apparently due to its ventilation design.

Ordering with Windows 7 is the more flexible option (assuming you're comfortable installing an OS from scratch) since you then get license keys for both operating systems, whereas 8.1 is a one-way ticket. That said, I think 8.1 is a better fit for this system, all things considered. However, if you need Photoshop, you're basically stuck if you buy a version with the QHD+ display. Your only workarounds would be to run the QHD+ panel at a lower resolution (which defeats the point of QHD+) or use that manifest file hack someone mentioned, but that causes even the image you're viewing to be scaled up, not just the UI, which again defeats the point of HiDPI and could introduce errors into your work. Unfortunately even if you resort to using a lower resolution, I wouldn't plan on switching down to that resolution only to use Photoshop, because when you change the resolution you'll also need to change the DPI scaling to match, and that requires logging off and back on, which will be highly irritating if you need to use Photoshop frequently.

 

Follow-up:
Illustrator now works with high-DPI (with version 17.1). I fired it up to 150% on my machine and the menus and such were resized accordingly. There was also a recent update to Photoshop but it doesn't look like it included high-DPI support. Hopefully soon, it looks like they're at least aware they need to do something.

 

Anyone know how AutoCAD or Revit scales? Anyone running it on 8.1?

 

Would this update only work with Illustrator CC though? I am running an older version of it so would updates even apply?