Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Few things I've noticed under Linux (Arch Linux 3.13, Gnome 3.10):
- Thanks to native UEFI, Linux directly boots in 1920x1080. The screen flickers only one time! Thanks to my SSD, booting time is around 8 seconds.
- Actually the Touchpad works absolutely flawless! Better than under Windows 8.1. No moving pointer, when clicking, very precise 2 point finger scrolling. Awesome!
- Touchscreen working out of the box - no flaws, everything's perfect!
- Sleeping / Hibernation works out of the box - no freezes, no issues. Works as expected!
- Batterylife is significantly worse than under Windows. At the moment, I don't have closed source Nvidia drivers installed, only Open Source nouveau. Hopefully, batterylife will improve after installing official drivers. According to powertop, the M3800 "eats" 22W when idling; my T440s consumed about 4W - 6W. I'm tuning the system now and will report back.
- nouveau doesn't play well with the Quadro K1100M. It spits out some error messages. You probably need to blacklist it and install official nvidia drivers (which should be quite good)

Nothing Linux related, but what I really like about the BIOS is, that you can actually browse FAT32 filesystems and choose EFI files, to boot from. This eliminates some headaches! Also, you can remove / delete unused EFI entries, to clean up. Awesome, I like it!

I'm considering disabling the K1100M for everyday life and only enable it, when I have access to a power source. I'm sure, there should be some scripts to automate this. This might save some battery.

 

I've got it to 14-15W (about 6 hours battery life) by disabling the Nvidia card by default by using Bumblebee, plus disabling on startup BT (I can enable it with the widget if I need it) and NFC (not applicable for the m3800), and lowering the screen brightness to 45%. Also with Gnome 3.10 / Cinnamon.

Not ideal, but better than out of the box.

There are some scripts that can be used to automate tasks when the laptop is running with AC or battery. I found and tweaked one to change the brightness depending on the power source, but I ended up disabling it because I usually prefer brightness than battery life. Some of those scripts have way more tweaks (CPU scheduler, HDD tweaks, etc) which I haven't messed with (yet). Please, keep us posted of your tweaks, achievements or issues.

 

I just noticed that in the Canada store we now have pre-config. I wanted 8.1 pre-installed and now that is an option which is great! So I contacted Dell, since my machine isn't to arrive until Mar27. They are working hard to see what they can do to change my order, but at this point the only options are a) take the machine as is with Win 7 or b) Cancel the order and reorder. Either way, we will see what happens.

 

It still comes with the 8.1 upgrade though right? It really isn't difficult to upgrade to 8.1 with the USB the include.

 

Yes, it just saves the step of sourcing all the drivers.

 

My m3800 has shipped. I guess requested changes to my machine after the fact forced them to shut me up by sending the computer a month early hahahaha. Fingers crossed for a problem free machine.

 

I'm at 11W discharge rate atm, with disabled NVIDIA graphics and SSD. No other tweaks. I should be able to squeeze out another 1W - 3W by enabling various energy saving mechanisms. I got a batterylife of around 4.5 - 5 hours at the moment - when doing almost nothing. Please note, that I have the 1080p screen. I'll keep you updated. Setting up Bumblebee is a headache, almost wasted 2 hours, with no satisfying result. Disabling NVIDIA card worked and I can run XServer on my Intel iGPU now, but I can't use optirun at the moment, due to some error messages.

Edit: By simply enabling PowerTOP Tunables, I've reached 8W - 9W when idling, giving me almost 6 hours of battery life. Awesome! I can probably squeeze out another 1W, if I tune the system a little bit further.

 

At present, I'm going to keep the system at Win 7 Pro.

The touchpad continues to be a tad wonky and I'd like to reinstall the drivers. But I can only find Win 8.1 drivers on the Dell support site. Where are the win 7 drivers?

 

Anybody have recommendations on a bluetooth mouse that is playing well with their system?

 

@erinch: I don't know why, but under Windows 8.1, the touchpad drivers suck. The pointer moves around, when you click. This doesn't happen under Linux, so it's definitely a driver issue. Actually, the touchpad is like a dream under Linux; everything works as you expect it! I'd recommend you to try out the common Synaptics Touchpad driver, instead of the customized Dell one - maybe they'll work better: Synaptics TouchPad-Treiber - Download - CHIP.

@all: I've finally got a working Optimus solution under Linux (ArchLinux kernel 3.13, Nvidia 331)! Kernel 3.13 has a bug, which prevents Optimus to work. I had to manually add rcutree.rcu_idle_gp_delay=1 to the kernel parameters - it's fully working right now! What deeply impressed me: Rendering MikePan's BMW Scene under Linux on the M3800 took around 1:53min, compared to my Workstation at home, featuring an Ivy-Bridge Quad-Core Xeon E3-1245v2 at 3.8GHz Turbo, which needs about 2:10mins. Very impressive, this M3800 is a monster! However, temperatures will climb up to 85°C while rendering and the unit will become relatively noisy. Still, I'll consider the M3800 as a rendering slave for my future projects! CUDA + K1100M worked quite well, but was slower than the CPU. I'm very pleased with the M3800.