Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Is there any way to change the 60WHr batttery to the 90WHr one? I would take out the 2,5" drive and put in mSATA like you did.
Are you satisfied with the Samsung 840 evo? Is the samsung 840 evo pro much better?

 

Upgrading the battery from a technical standpoint is trivial. The challenge thus far has been obtaining it. People in different countries have tried calling Dell Spare Parts even with the part number for the larger battery, and all of them have been told that it isn't available for sale through that channel. Don't even bother trying to find it as an official accessory online or through the regular sales channels (where you'd find batteries officially considered user-replaceable); it'll never show up there. I imagine once any supply issues are sorted out it will become available through Dell Spare Parts, but until then that will be your largest hurdle.

Or if you can find someone with the larger battery who wants the smaller one to make room for an additional drive, you'd be all set.

As for the 840 Evo vs 840 Pro (there's no such thing as an Evo Pro), the 840 Pro is generally going to be faster on certain write transactions because of its MLC flash rather than TLC -- but the 840 Evo has some cool tricks up its sleeve to minimize that gap. Read the benchmarks and decide whether the differences pertain to a type of workload you'd be subjecting your SSD to. If so and the price difference is worth it, get the Pro. Otherwise, the Evo is a screaming fast SSD in its own right.

 

It may be possible to swap the batteries over, but at the moment I don't know of anyone who has got hold of the correct battery and any mounting hardware that might be needed.If you want the 90WHr battery you'd have to order a model without the 2.5" drive and then just upgrade the mSATA drive if you needed more room.

The 840 pro benchmarks better in some tests, but it's nothing you'd ever notice in general use. The 840 Evo uses TLC NAND memory and as such it's endurance (NOT reliability) will be lower. Realistically it'll last many times longer than you will need it to, even under the heaviest client workload, so I wouldn't worry. The 840 Pro tops out at 512GB and is not available as mSATA in any case. I think the only other large mSATA SSD you can get is the 480GB Crucial M500, but that is quite a poor performer and I have had many issues with the earlier Crucial m4 drives in Dell Latitude laptops.

There are loads of reviews out there for both drives, but don't confuse the standard 840 with the 840 EVO - that really did have noticeably worse write performance. I've got loads of Samsung 830 and 840 series drives in service and they've been totally trouble free. I can't say the same for any other brand of SSD I've used.

 

After using my machine for over a month now, I can still say that I am very satisfied. No major issues to report or noises coming from it. The last glitch I had was with the screen freezing when coming back from sleep and not being able to click anywhere on the screen with mouse or track pad. But I tried the quick multiple swipe on the track pad when that occurs which was mentioned by someone a few posts back and after one or two tries that seems to be doing the job.... That is totally acceptable for now especially if it is a driver issue that might be fixed later. The only solution before was to either restart the machine or wait long enough for it to wake...
So I am almost home free... lol
I am just confirming that this has worked for me as well and might help others...
Cheers...

 

My M3800 has the similar problem with the Intel 7260 WIFI. I was not able to connect it to my office router despite many trouble-shoot (built-in), on-off (router and M3800), updated the driver to latest version (jan 214), it just keep connecting and dropping. Also, I found that if I disconnect the High Speed USB3 Dock, restart M3800 and my router, the wifi got connected. If this dock is connected to my M3800, same problem occurred. Anything wrong with the Dock or WIFI card ?

I have spoken to Dell, they have no solution "yet" (I hope).

 

For those having issues with the WiFi. With the Intel 6300 card, I experienced similar trouble, and was only able to resolve it by going to device manager and finding the option to disable 802.11n (meaning it will use 802.11g instead). This is not exactly an unknown issue, I've experienced in several other laptops using Intel 6xxx wifi cards, and it's the reason my M6700 now has an Atheros card.

Wondering if the problem has continued into the 7260 cards. I know disabling 802.11n/ac will make things slower, but it's something that might be worth trying, and sometimes slow is better than broken.

 

I have not had any issues with the Aruba routers at work, but I did see more stable connections to my Netgear router at home after updating the router firmware.

The dock is an interesting variable. If you don't use the Ethernet port in the dock, try disabling it in the device manager and see if that fixes the issue.

 

Thanks! That is what I did and the problem seems to have been solved. With that out of the way I really like this computer. Now my only complaints are the gloss finish screen (My M4400 and my M20 before that were all matte) and the reduced keyboard that cheats me of dedicated page up/down, home and end keys as well as integrating the volume into the F keys (I still use those keys). Still, I really like the system. A coworker decided to get the same system even though he isn't a Dell fan.

 

Well, these were things you knew before buying it. Still, I think it's one of the best compromises out there - good performance, lightweight, high quality, aluminium top in trade of glossy screen and reduced keyboard. That's okay. Prior to the M3800, I got the Lenovo ThinkPad T440s and wasn't really satisfied with Lenovo's new ThinkPad Lineup. So, there is no real competition imho (besides MacBook Pro, which also has a glossy screen + doesn't run native Windows smoothly).

I'm going to get my M3800 tomorrow, I will report about my unit !

 

I was looking into the Thinkpad t440 yesterday after my own disappointment with the glossy screen. Can you elaborate a little on what your experiences were with it, likes, dislikes, etc.? And anyone ever run Revit off a GeForce gt 730m? The m3800 has a 'pro' graphics card, but not sure if that's necessary for average size models?