Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I received my M3800 last week (QHD, i7, 256GB SSD+500GB HDD). My system's exact weight is 2045g.

Some remarks/questions:

I don't have the coil whine issue. But occasionally (say once or twice a day) there is a short beep or two coming from top left corner. Will this develop in a continuous coil whine or buzz?

Does anyone know if the security slot on the right hand side is compatible with Kensington locks? My cable lock does not seems to fit in the opening... (works fine on other laptops).

When I look at the screen from an angle (more than 45 degrees horizontally), then white turns to yellow (grey turns to white). Anyone else has this?

M3800 came with USB2/LAN adapter. I bought a USB3 to 3xUSB3+1xLAN adapter from Inateck. Seems to work fine.

The 3200x1600 screen resolution is not so great in practice: Firefox and thunderbird are ok, but Adobe acrobat has tiny icons in its toolbar. Some other applications as well.
Even Windows dialog boxes are sometimes blurry (e.g. the Device Manager).

I tried linux mint and Ubuntu as well: I didn't find an obvious way to set scaling. Yes, it's possible to set font sizes but that doesn't scale scroll bars etc...

 

I really wish Adobe would update CS6 and Lightroom 4 to work with high DPI displays as well as the Creative Cloud versions. The older software was updated for Apple, but Windows users are being pushed into updating to their new pricing / big brother scheme.

 

1. The spec page calls that slot a Noble lock slot. No idea why somebody felt they had to reinvent the wheel here, especially if backward compatibility couldn't be preserved....

2. Yes, while the QHD+ display is known for outstanding color accuracy and gamut, it is not known for color fidelity during off-angle viewing. That's just the nature of the beast.

3. Yep, but the included adapter supports PXE booting if that's ever needed. My guess is that Dell knew enterprise customers would need PXE booting (especially with no optical drive) for imaging purposes, and they probably hadn't developed a USB 3.0 adapter with PXE yet. In fact there probably simply hasn't been a need yet, since this may well be their first enterprise laptop that includes USB 3.0 but no built in NIC.

4. Yep, Adobe and Microsoft both have some catching up to do. That too is the nature of the QHD+ beast, at least for the time being.

 

I have been following the xps 15 closely until now because I am interested in a compact and powerful machine for college(mostly code compiling) plus some gaming and thus I stayed away from the M3800. However I just read the review of m3800 on notebookcheck and it seems the quadro performs more than decently in gaming. Have any of you users tried gaming on this card? Can it hold up with the new titles? I would really like the m3800 over xps as it has more configuration options than xps. Or should I stay away from this if I want a decent gaming machine? thank you...

 

You have some extremely good eyesight if you can play Civ 5 at 3200x1800! The text UI elements don't scale up enough for my own comfort.

There's definitely some color change at high viewing angles on mine. Compared to regular business laptops, it's a lot less; from farther out, my Latitude will look practically inverted; compared to the IPS screens in better tablets, it's still quite noticeable on mine.

I'm much more familiar with KDE where you can set the system DPI through the Settings->Display UI on KDE. You can also find where Mint or Ubuntu starts the X server (presumably in some kind of config file for whatever they use instead of XDM) and pass in the command line "--dpi 192"

Even in KDE, not everything scales, although it's usable -- better than Windows 7.

Some further discussion here:
How to find and change the screen DPI? - Ask Ubuntu
Linux Mint Forums • View topic - Do we need a display (not font) DPI setting?

Our rep was pushing the XPS 13 as if it were an enterprise laptop, somewhere around 12-15 months ago, and their Latitude slates (ST, 10) have never had NICs or optical drives (although some of them had ethernet in the dock, which I think was itself USB2.)

Not the absolute fastest machine for compiling code, but with an SSD, the machine is absolutely brilliant with both Visual Studio 2013 and IntelliJ idea 13.

The slight speed bump on the GPU for the XPS 13 is not going to be noticeable in anything but benchmarking. Sleeping Dogs isn't the newest title, but it plays it really nicely and smoothly at Medium, and OK but a little low FPS on High.

SWOTOR plays beautifully on very high at 1600x900, although the issues getting it to deal with the scaling are funky enough that I do better on 3200x1800 at medium.

Civ 5 plays at 3200x1800 but the UI is too small to play comfortably (for me; Bokeh differs.) I can't get it to scale reliably at lower resolutions, although sometimes it will by using the DirectX 9 version.

A few older games won't play at all on Windows 8.1 (Disciples 2, SW:KOTOR) although this was mainly checking out of curiosity rather than actually still playing these.

Haven't had a chance to try anything really new although I've got a few other things in Steam that are newer than Sleeping Dogs.

 

...and I've discovered how to get Civ5 (and possibly other games) to play scaled!!!!

Run the game once. Note the nasty window box with black bars if it's full screen Set it to a reasonable windowed mode -- 1600x900 if you want windowed fullscreen, or 1280x800 if you want most of the screen. Exit

(Note that this does not work with the fullscreen modes, which force it into HIGHDPIAWARE automatically )

Look in regedit now, for
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers]

Find the key created for your Civ5 executable, e.g. on mine:
D:\Games\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\CivilizationV_DX11.exe
(it's probably under c:\program files(x86) on most people's)

The string value will probably be "HIGHDPIAWARE" -- replace it with a single "~" character (not including the quotes) which signifies a user-provided setting.

Close regedit.

Relaunch CivV. Enjoy! (And don't use fullscreen mode, or you'll just have to do it all over again.)

--

And found a fix for the DX9 Civ5 fullscreen:
Go to --
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Direct3D\Shims\MaximizedWindowedMode]
"D:\\Games\\SteamLibrary\\steamapps\\common\\Medieval II Total War\\medieval2.exe"=dword:00000001

and delete the entry there for Civ5
(ignore that the example there is medieval2 -- I've gone a little nuts lately trying to see which games play nicely. Most do, except really, really old stuff, and Civ 5.)

See also:
http://vvvv.org/forum/windows-8-fullscreen-issue
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722305(v=ws.10).aspx

 

After a while of reading this, and having been to an Apple Store, I am seriously considering buying a Macbook Pro.
I already have had it in 2006, and quickly switched to a bulky M90, given it was more powerful and suitable for an all-Windows CAD-mainly use.
Not to mention the exceptional service that Dell was able to guarantee in those years.

Now I see this:

- Apple service is excellent, in particular for business customers (I run a very small business, so no Premier advantages)

- The zero upgradeability of the Mac (after purchase) has to be balanced with a better used value (you can resell it if you need to have more), versus locked default configurations (you can upgrade it, but if you want more from start, you have to put aside the spare part from Dell)

- if you can manage to switch most of your activity to OSX, the software emulators are better than they were back in those days; if you can't or you mostly have to squeeze out power using Windows apps, you can consider Boot Camp with very limited ( - > zero) OSX partition.
It is also possible to run Windows in an external SSD connected using Thunderbolt

- higher speeds CPUs are available (comparing rMBP to M3800)

- overall product quality is very high

- the price is higher (but this depends on how long are you planning to keep it, and there is always a good used price value compared to any other brand)

- there is some issue with throttling, but it seems to be there with heavy GPU usage and it should be improved/resolved with new models.

Now, I need some advice from those of you in my situation, in particular some info about throttling issues with late 2013 rMBP models.

I have been with Dell now for more than 7 years (M90 and, now, a continuously updated M6400), and have had also some experience with some lower sized Lenovo for travel intensive weeks (X201), but really not sure about what to do.

Main activities are light 3D and 2D CAD, lots of data analysis on the go (the increased resolution is welcome, also if hawk eye will be needed..), some heavy FE Modeling and FEA calculation for early model testing (the heavy job will be done on a separate server).

Please help

GB

 

I have both an M3800 and rMBP. the OS-X high res experience is miles better, the hardware specs are pretty much comparable with a slight nudge to the rMBP for it's PCI-E graphics and slighly faster CPU perhaps. The option of a 2nd drive and easily upgraded mSATA drive in the M3800 might be worth something to you, also Quadro verified drivers for Windows if you need them.

As for service, you must be joking about apple being good, if you have a hardware failure it's a joke. You have to either post the damned thing away or make an appointment for a few days time to see some snot nosed idiot who's used to selling grandma a new iMac who then sends it away for you. Oh yes, and only for the first year. You can pay £280 odd for 3 years of similar service.The BASIC warranty on the Dell is 3 years of next business day on site service, which I have upgraded to 5 years along with 5 years of accidental damage for... £270 odd. I'm afraid that unless the experience in your country is wildly different from the UK then the level of support and service you get is not even close. The guys in India for Dell are actually very good too, and if you pay for Pro Support you speak to some very good people indeed in Ireland.

As for Throttling, I've seen this in both the 2012 rMBP and the M3800, particularly if you tax the GPU and CPU at the same time. In the CPU case it hasn't dropped below it's base clock but it doesn't turbo up anymore, but the GPU will drop well below base clocks. That's always going to happen in a thin and light machine like this. If you want to max out the CPU and GPU for long periods you're going to need to look at the old school fat workstation laptops I'm afraid :-(

 

dme123,

Thanks for your reply, that is very useful to me.

Yes, I got that (after the first year) you have to pay to get support and you basically have it if you can easily reach an Apple store.
I am also a great fan of the (formerly called) CompleteCare NBD support, but, being in Italy we have not a local Dell Branch anymore and it shows (I requested a quote last Wednesday and I am still waiting): in the past I had very good experience with server and workstation support, but it is not anywhere near now.

I am not an Apple fan, so I am very comfortable in considering these items.
More, I am considering also M4800 but, since I daily carry my M6400 in a backpack, I would appreciate something lighter (I don't need the extra GPU power and 17" vs 15.6 is not that big difference).

Thanks

GB

Inviato dal mio SM-N9005 utilizzando Tapatalk

 

To be honest, if it were my money and I could only have one or the other I would keep the Macbook. The hi-DPI experience in Windows is really very poor, and because of the way display scaling has historically been handled in Windows I think it will remain a very poor experience for a long time.