Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

That's simple: I'll never user 8.x, so it really makes no difference.

Whoah, whoah, whoah... That's a whole bunch of assumptions there, spoken and unspoken, that you have no basis for, at all. Let's take the two obvious ones:

- If you care to check, I have never, not once, advised anyone to avoid Windows 8.x without qualification. While I have made my own opinion abundantly clear, I do label my opinion as such. In contrast, you can find a number of posts of mine where I explicitly tell people that the choice is entirely up to them, and their personal preferences and usage patterns.
- I have indeed tested both Windows 8 and even 8.1. I found them both unusable for my purposes. I have amply explained the reasons for my judgment elsewhere, and this is off-topic here in any case, so I won't go any further.

I will just observe that you have no basis for this remark of yours. I do wonder, however, what prompted you to finish your post with this underhanded insult.

They are, and cost is no object, relatively speaking. Thanks for the confirmation.

 

Fair enough. My point about advising others is directed more around posts of yours claiming that 8.1 has "no significant benefits of any kind" over Win7, and more recently, calling it "worthless". That may be true for you, but you didn't say "worthless/insignificant to me"; you made a blanket statement which is simply false. Just off the top of my head, here are a few 8.1 Pro features that may be worthwhile over Win7 Pro to individuals and/or businesses:

- BitLocker and BitLocker To Go (including support for drives with built-in hardware encryption)
- Full UEFI support (without needing Legacy Option ROMs/Compatibility Support Module enabled)
- UASP support
- SMB 3.0 support
- Multi-display RDP host
- Better scaling support (even for FHD owners in case they get 4K external displays)
- Support for the new version of DirectAccess (if your corporation deploys Server 2012 on the backend)
- Fast Boot support (without proprietary third-party implementations)
- Per-display taskbar support (again, without third-party applications)
- Hyper-V
- Significantly better Task Manager
- More efficient memory management
- Better battery life when comparing the same benchmarks on the same hardware
- Free upgrade to Windows 8.2 when it's released with whatever features make it into that release

Obviously some of those may be of limited appeal and/or impact, and I'm sure if I sat here for longer I could come up with more, but you're right this is getting off-topic. But the fact is that Win8.1 does present a value proposition over Win7 at least for some. As for the stubbornness comment, I grant that it was unnecessary but I don't believe it was unwarranted. You closed yourself off from an option that would have cost you nothing simply because you've already decided that it couldn't possibly be of any value to you now or in the future, as if it would be inconceivable for your needs to change, or for you to learn about some desirable benefit of Win8.1 later that you aren't currently aware of, or for Windows 8.2 to bring something to the table you might want and would have been able to attain for free had you not closed that door on yourself for no reason at all.

 

Here you go again, making assumptions that you have no basis for. I really have no inclination to entertain this bizarre debate, but I'll offer you two points to consider:
a) It just might be the case that Windows 8.x, whatever its additional features over Windows 7, might lack some features that are essential to me. It might also be that my time is valuable, so that futzing around with an OS to try and make it work for what I need is not a good value proposition. In other words, it is not the case that trying Windows 8 one more time is an option that would have cost me nothing; there is in fact a very substantial cost involved in me giving Windows 8.x another try, for no good reason.
b) As far as speculating on whatever the future may bring, I'll just observe that Microsoft is doing what they can to get over Windows 8 as fast as they possibly can. It seems the so far rumored release of Windows 9 next spring may even be moved up even further. Why in the world would I then waste my time with an OS that's essentially dead?

 

Can't we all just hold hands, sing kumabya and move on. Win 7 vs 8.1, though a valid discussion is off topic now. We all love each other here so let's get back to ing about coil whine. Ha!

 

Excellent point. One thing I wonder is how subjective this coil whine might be. For example, I could imagine it's very high-frequency. Since the cut-off frequency of human hearing drops off reliably with age, people older than, say 45 (random example), may not be able to hear any of this, even if a younger person might find it terribly annoying. I'll let y'all know when the machine arrives. Right now I do not expect to have an issue with the coil whine, but I am apprehensive as to the display quality. If that's sub-par, and since the QHD screen is probably not an option for me (due to scaling issues in certain applications I need), that would take the M3800 out of contention. We shall see...

 

Mine hasn't had any coil whine, but I'm pushing 40. I'm now tempted to ask one of my early-20s coworkers if they hear a high pitched sound when my laptop is plugged in.

 

I am 19, and I can confirm this high pitched sound. I hope it is not an issue.

 

No, your hearing is fine.

 

Ok, I tested the battery usage at different resolutions (with the IGZO / QHD+ screen). At 3200x1800, it uses about 15W (in idle, with wifi enabled). Just switching the resolution to 1920x1080, the energy usage lowers to 12W. That's about 3W less for driving the desktop in FHD resolution.

Also tested a full white background and full black background. No noticeable difference in battery use.

As per powertop, the wireless module is using most of the energy, about 7W, so I guess the only main remaining action to take is to put the wireless in some sort of power-saving mode.

 

I'm running the wireless card with N disabled, which caused some connection drops. Running the display with 1920x1080 uses less GPU power, which probably caused the gain in battery life. But else, your power consumption sounds very nice!

As for the coil whine: at normal usage, there is no coil whine on my unit. But it gets hearable, depending on the GPU load, battery level and only when the power is plugged in. So people, who are claiming, that they don't have any coil whine issue, please recheck this with different GPU loads. I'm mid 20, if that matters. We're not talking about almost unhearable16kHz sounds - it's still high-pitched, but my guess would be around 6kHz - 8kHz. It's subjective, whether it annoys you or not (and depends on headphones / environment / typical workload). It doesn't bother me.

//Edit: I don't know, if this is intended / by design or a bug. I can't press "Fn + Windows key + Shift + Down (Page Down)" at the same time - it won't register the Shift key. I need this to move around windows between workspaces in Gnome 3. It's only working, if I press "Shift" prior to "Fn". Could someone verify this under Windows?