Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Sure, that may very well be true. I used to have something like 20/10 vision myself, close to the theoretical, physical limits of the human visual system. In those days I would have gotten the QHD+ panel without question. These days, however, there's no point in me getting that kind of a display.

 

I have to say that, in cases where scaling isn't an issue, the QHD panel looks quite a bit sharper and clearer than my older 1920x1200 M4400 panel. The M4400 panel has somewhat higher pixel density vs a 1080p 15.6" screen. It's not quite as obvious as say the iPad 2 vs iPad3-retina but it is quite nice when looking at things like full page height pdfs and even just web pages in a half screen window. However, I will admit all isn't perfect. I used my M4400 with only slight scale changes. I basically bumped up the size of a few icons but I ran the system scaling at 100%. I found it easy to use an external screen with the main panel. With the M3800 the 150% scaling makes the use of a second screen somewhat problematic. If you use the same scaling on all screens a typical pixel density external display has really large text. You can also use the scale per monitor mode. That results in the second screen always looking fuzzy. Not a big fan of that. The net result is I rarely use the second screen. My 3 year old edition of Solidworks doesn't scale to gracefully. Useable but not better than on my lower def screen.

That said, when shopping for this system I had real trouble accepting a 1080p screen since that was a step back in resolution vs my old system. The QHD screen at least let me feel that I was still going up vs down in the pixel count war.

 

Thanks for that link. I was only half way there in my reading through the thread. I noted your comments about the navigation keys. This is one area where Dell could have usefully copied Samsung and put a column of keys up the right side. The E7440 is reasonably OK in this respect having put Pg Up and Pg Dn in the gaps above the cursor left and right keys.

My eyes are also well past their best before date (nearly 30 years ago I used an Osborne 1 with 5" display).

Even the E7440 is a bit heavier than the 15.0" Samsung and that's with a battery of lower capacity. The natural successor to my 15.0" Samsung is the 15.6" NP930X5J (I don't need a separate GPU) but I've given up waiting for stock to show up in UK. Anyway, I hope that someone can put their M3800 on some digital kitchen scales (don't most houses have them these days?).

John

 

This is with the new motherboards or perhaps the new BIOS (?).
Can someone else also confirm this?

"I can also tell you Dells little 'secret' about getting rid of the coil whine. In the BIOS they have set the battery charge mode to 'adaptive'. What adaptive does is that the battery will never charge to 100 %, the battery level will reach and stay at 99 % all the time while on AC. Changing the battery charge mode in the bios to 'custom' or to 'standard' brings the coil whine back.

It is so at least for me, I have the precision m3800. The situation may be different for you who have the xps modell."

Before I did not saw the option for 'adaptive' in the system BIOS, only 'standard' and 'custom'.
Regards

Sent from my iphone 5s using chrome browser

 

Adaptive was the factory default on my XPS 15 and it came with BIOS A00, so no this isn't it. And nobody who has coil whine found that it was eliminated by keeping their machine in Adaptive mode, because the whine occurs when the battery isn't charging, whether you've set it to stop charging at 100, 99, or 80%, so Adaptive mode would make zero difference to that behavior. But if you look at the XPS 15 thread, you'll also find my post about having received the revised motherboard yesterday afternoon, which eliminated my coil whine even under conditions that reliably caused it on my original board.

 

Hm, now I suspect something. You, jphughan, work for Dell, can you please explain the meaning of the following?

In the service activity log, it is stated:

Parts

HMDTJ SVC,PLN,TRPM,I74702D,M3800,W8P Returned
TPNTM DC-IN CABLE,9530 Returned
K036W ASSY,CBL,BTB,9530 Returnerd

That number, 9530, is dells model number for the XPS 15, what does that mean? Did I got parts from a XPS into my precision M3800?

Regards

 

I can't quite tell what Parts 2 and 3 on that list are from those descriptions, but given that the M3800 and XPS 15 are hardware-identical except for the system badge, GPU, and the lack of an NFC add-in card on the M3800 doesn't include the NFC add-in card, my guess is that Dell didn't bother creating separate part numbers for physically identical parts. I suspect this system was designed and developed first as an XPS 15 and at some point Dell decided to tweak it a tiny bit to create a Precision variant -- after all, there's precedent for this type of system on the XPS side, but the M3800 is a brand new type of system for the Precision line (thin and light, no Ethernet, optical drive, or docking connector, etc). The same seems to be true of the new Precision M2800, which appears to be a Latitude E6540 with slightly different internals. And there's the fact that the internal codename for the XPS 15 9530 is Testarossa. The codename for the Precision M3800 is just Testarossa-P.

In any case, if I'm right, when that decision was made, Dell probably saw no point in creating a whole new raft of part numbers and descriptions that simply replace "9530" with "M3800", or even changing all of the existing descriptions to include both models. After all, what would be the practical benefit of such an exercise for the effort it would take and potential impact it would have across their various applications and systems?

Unless you got the wrong motherboard, which it doesn't appear that you did, you didn't get "XPS parts in your M3800". You just got the right parts for your system, which also happen to be the right parts for another system.

 

Just to add to jphughan said, many of the older Precisions were based on Latitude models. My M20 was almost identical to the D610. The only differences were the labels that said Precision and the code in the BIOS. You could reflash the M20 to think it was a D610 including the changes to the GPU bios to make it think it was no longer the CAD card.

I think the M6400 was the first dedicated Precision model that wasn't shared with a Latitude or other laptop. For the 15" laptops I think the M4600 was the first stand alone model. My M4400 is clearly a Latitude variant.

 

I had an M90 and then an M6300, and I don't think either were based off of any other model. There have never been 17" Latitudes, and I don't remember any similar-looking Inspiron, Vostro (remember those?) or XPS model at the time. Didn't know about being able to reflash an M20 to behave like a D610 though -- I wonder if it worked the other way....

 

Check out the Inspiron 9300
. I think it was the basis for the older 17 Precisions.

I think you could go D610 to M20 if you had the ATI GPU