Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

They're both great choices and well matched, to the point that if there's a significant price gap, I'd just go with whatever's cheaper. All things being equal though, I'd personally lean toward the Samsung just because Samsung is the only vendor that develops all of their SSD components in-house: NAND chips, NAND controller, PCB, and firmware. Samsung's option would also allow you to use their RAPID mode to turn some of your system RAM into an SSD cache if that's important to you, though I've read mixed reviews about its performance.

 

I think I have bought 4 Samsung 840's now, and I have been very happy with them. I also like the Magician software, they have done some very nice work to tune and speed up typical performance of their SSDs. Mine really scream.

 

They scream? Isn't that a bad thing? I mean, what with people here complaining endlessly about a little coil whine, and now there's these SSDs that not just whine, but scream! That's horrible!

 

Thank you guys! I've ordered Samsung's ssd

 

This noise, the scalling problems on windows with Adobe (not dell problem), poor battery life and some other issues made me give up on the M3800 before getting it.
Dell has been really bad with some releases latelly, those ultra high end screens, a lot of their laptops and even desktops with PSU problems.
A lot of their products should be checked much more prior to release, everyone is spending lots of time and $ with their bad releases...

 

More problems have arisen on my m3800...

I'll have the machine plugged in and the battery will show 100% full. After working on it for a bit, I'll put the computer to sleep, restart or for whatever reason the power to the laptop via the AC/DC adapter will be cycled. The power cycling occurred when I had the AC/DC adapter plugged into a power strip, and the strip was toggled on and off repeatedly (I was doing a test with some other circuitry and forget the laptop was powered by the same source). After any of these actions (sleep, restart,power cycle), I noticed the battery began to charge again, showing 13%. It was just at 100% literally seconds earlier.

This doesn't happen every time I perform any of these actions, but it has happened to me a few times now.

Anyone else have this issue?

 

Interesting.... this behavior has been reported in the XPS 15 thread by a few people, but since they noticed the battery drop overnight, the assumption has been that they've inadvertently configured their system to wake itself up, either through Smart Connect, wake timers, or even by having Wake on USB enabled and the mouse somehow getting nudged. But if you saw the reading drop in the space of only a few seconds, I wonder if the error is limited to just reading the battery life correctly. If it happens again like this, I'd be curious whether the battery lasts a lot longer than you'd expect a battery at 13% to last. You may have to disable the Windows features like hibernating/sleeping when the battery reading drops to a certain level to test this.

 

soooooo should i avoid buying the M3800? just too many problems?

 

If any of these problems would bother you too much, avoid the M3800. The alternatives (Lenovo W540 for example or Lenovo T540p - I don't consider a MacBook Pro as an alternative) have more serious problems than the M3800, like a constant, charge- and load-unrelated speaker-noise issue, data corruption issue due to UEFI implementation problems, serious hardware problems (like badly glued display-bezels, which come off and don't stick anymore), dropping WLAN (which is due to the poor Intel 7260 WLAN chipset, all Notebooks featuring this WLAN chipset have problems, including the M3800), BIOS whitelisting and so on...

Excluding the coil whine issue, I'm absolutely happy with my M3800, I would buy it again. Just go for the 1080p screen, so you can avoid any HiDPI-related issues and start getting productive instead of fixing HiDPI-related issues with your software / operating system. I couldn't find any competitive alternatives in this price range (bought mine for 1450€ via amazon), which would be better suited for me.

 

I would go for the QHD+ screen. The colors are much more accurate when calibrated than almost any other screen out there. Newer versions of Adobe's software look great and don't have the scaling issues.

Has there ever been a survey to see what countries the coil whine issues happen in? We have had 3 M3800s come through here and none of them had any issues listed above except for the 7260 being flaky on Wi-Fi when Bluetooth was also being used.

On the UEFI data issues - do the BIOS and drive Firmware updates fix things?