Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

What Prime95 settings are you using? Just did Furmark with your settings and Prime95 8 core blended for around 15 minutes and it never throttled. I did see 127 watts being pulling at the wall. A 90 watt adapter will throttle. Glad they shipped a 130!

I am wondering if you have found a very specific way to make the heat load outrun the fans kicking in.

Currently testing with the GPU at 836 core / 2500 memory. This would put it closer to the XPS15.

 

I have to report the info even in this thread (even it's crossposting):

So there are not 2 monitor supplier, but only one and it's Sharp.

 

I am not seeing any throttling. Still trying to figure out what we are doing differently.

I booted the system and ran Furmark until the temps stabilized. I then started up Prime95 (in the graph, this is the second jump). Temps kept going up, the fans kicked in to high mode and temps went down. The fans then slowed down. The system stayed stable for 10 minutes. I did not start HWinfo on this run until it was about 5 minutes in, so you don't see the absolute min temp of 31C or the 90C where the fans hit high.




I then repeated the test with the GPU clocks at 836/2500. HWinfo64 was running the whole time for this test.

I did see a 6C increase in GPU temps.

 

Use the large fft torture test in prime. See if that makes a difference.

 

Running now with the OC GPU clocks. I also made sure Prime and Furmark hit at exactly the same time on a cold system with the fans off. 4 minutes in, no throttling. I am able to get the CPU temp up to a peak of 93C before the fans fully kick in. Right now temps are 87-91C on the CPU and 79C on the GPU. Will grab the screenshot in another 15 minutes or so.

 

wat is max core and mem OC of the gpu you can get (stable) ?

 

I'll spend some time on it again tomorrow. May I ask what you're using to overclock the graphics card?

 

The programs that allow gpu overclock are Nvidia Inspector and MSI Afterburner.

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

In case anyone decides to put an SSD in their M3800 like me, don't bother with creating factory restore disks with Dell Backup & Recovery, because it won't let you install it on a hard drive of a different size than what came with the computer. It makes no sense to me, but it's true. Booting from the recovery partition doesn't work either, as it gives the same error.

So if you want to put in an SSD, you either need to create an image of your computer, or download the Windows ISO to do a fresh install (what I'm doing atm).

Also, if you want to put the ISO onto a USB drive to do a fresh install, be forewarned that apparently the newer USB drives register as local disks (hard drives) instead of removable media, which means they won't work with the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. I bought a USB drive today and found that out the hard way. You can blame this change on Windows 8.

Last piece of advice: The mSATA slot is actually hidden under a ribbon connector that is directly in front of the left side of the battery.

 

Some newer USB drives are doing that in order to support Windows To Go. The reason they appear as fixed drives rather than removable is because Windows has never allowed removable disks to contain more than one partition, and Windows To Go requires more than one. But a flash drive that mounts as a fixed disk would at least allow you to have multiple partitions on it, which has its conveniences (e.g. FAT32 partitions for booting EFI-compatible Windows installers with an NTFS or exFAT data partition for general use).