Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Looking at this picture from the first page of this thread:



I don't see where another drive could possibly go?

 

Top left is WiFi, middle left a tiny ways in is the mSATA drive, and the 2.5" is bottom right (this shows the smaller battery - the larger one would go all the way from bottom left to bottom right).


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Ahh.... That makes sense now..

So I could leave the 500GB 2.5" hard drive that came with the computer in it and also put an mSATA SSD in it? If so, that's awesome!

 

Yup. I would consider disconnecting the 500GB drive and reinstalling windows, then reconnecting and formatting the larger drive, so you get the benefit of booting the OS and running programs off the speedy SSD, with the larger drive for general storage.


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Thanks fore the answers. You may also want to check out the NotebookCheck review of the XPS15: Review Dell XPS 15 (9530, Late 2013) Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews .. see the "Temperatures" section.

They did a variety of stress tests. With just the CPU under stress (GPU at idle), throttling occurred at 2.6 GHz. They don't mention the ambient temps and the stress test wasPrime95 which I consider unrealistic as I never could reproduce temps under load as high as those produced by Prime95 ... AIDA64 and Intel XTU are much closer to how much I can push the CPU in Matlab (full 4 cores included).

Regarding idle temps. Can you comfortably keep the M3800 on your lap when you're just browsing (or at idle) or it gets too hot for that?

Cheers.

 

Actually that review does show CPU throttling, both when only the CPU is under load, and more severly when also the GPU is used (CPU drops to 2.3 GHz). In fact, according to that review, the CPU always throttle when under Prime95.

 

Has anyone else had serious issues with the touchpad? I've used my laptop for a few hours today and it seems incredibly finnicky. I'm having a lot of trouble scrolling with two fingers in particular, as sometimes it just starts going crazy (selecting text, jumping to the top of the page, cursor starts randomly jumping around, etc..).

 

Have you checked that you have the latest drivers?


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Where are you seeing those clock ratings? I'm pretty sure one spec listing is showing the doubled figure since the RAM is DDR and the other is listing the non-doubled figure. There's no way the difference is that high. 2800x2 = 5600 MHz, which seems much more reasonable a gap.

The top-spec model that includes the 512GB SSD has the larger battery, and no way to install a 2.5" drive.

 

Yes you can install a full-capacity SSD in the mSATA slot in addition to your 2.5" drive. Make sure the BIOS SATA operation is set to AHCI rather than Intel Smart Response though. If your system came with a 32GB cache in that slot, that will need to be removed, and changing the BIOS SATA operation mode may require you to reinstall the OS -- but once you do, you're golden.

It's shown in the mSATA section of the manual.

Yes, you can run both 2.5" and mSATA simultaneously -- unless you get the top-spec model with the larger battery, in which case you'll be mSATA-only. See my response to the first quote in this post.