Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Well I found a 90w and a 65w adapter with the correct voltage and tip. I remember my old laptop's 90w dapter was hit or miss on planes so I wonder if the M3800 would run of of 65w. I don't need the battery to charge and really it's mostly for low powered applications - email, internet, word processing, etc.

 

then just discard the warning and if you see that the 800MHZ are too slow start throttle stop and disable BD ProcHot for the duration of the flight. DO AT YOUR OWN RISK
In my tests the 800MHZ are ok for what you want

 

I got my m3800 today. What a ridiculous system!!? Quite simply blown away, are my initial impressions of the unit. For a refurbished unit I have no idea what or who used it. System is perfect.. Aesthetically and technically. The screen is amazing, but just too high to run natively with no scaling applied. With windows 7 I don't have any issues scaling to 150% in windows settings yet. I ran 4 videos side by side at 4k on YouTube with no problems.. So really impressed with the capability of the machine.

Device manager says I have a 512gb Liteonit SSD which is 7mm. Guessing this is occupying my main bay so I won't be able to put my other 120gb SSD in it to make 632 GB SSD system sad times. The under cover also has the annoying screws on!, so bkt able to verify as I don't have the right screwhead to remove the cover.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Great news, congrats! I've only bought two refurb systems from the Dell Outlet myself, and both of them were indistinguishable from brand new systems, especially given that I was able to add full-length warranties to them. Some systems that end up in the Dell Outlet are from orders that were cancelled after the systems were put into production but before they shipped out, so in some cases you really are getting a brand new system. Maybe I lucked out both times with one of those systems, or else Dell apparently does a very good job cleaning these systems up before reselling them.

Another perk of the Outlet now that Dell is making it difficult to impossible to get a fully customized system (and sometimes not making certain options available on ANY of the preconfigured SKUs) is that Outlet systems may have configurations you want but can't find in the regular store because the systems may have originally been ordered by entities with Premier accounts, which often have much greater option flexibility. For example, a while ago none of the preconfigured Latitude E7440 specs featured the beautiful 1080p IPS display available for that system (they all had the crappy 1366x768 panel), so a friend of mine found an E7440 in the Outlet that had that panel and loves it. Since then Dell seems to have corrected that particular spec oversight on the E7440 preconfigured options.

 

I would have tended to use that description for somthing that was overpriced for what it is (like this).

However, reading the rest of your comment suggests that you are very happy with your investment.

John

 

Haha.. It's ridiculously good! For the money.. Design is top notch. Screen is lovely. Why would anyone want a macbook

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

One of the regular 90W adapters left over from a latitude, plus the pigtail adapter, works for me just as the 90W (round/car adapter) does. Haven't tried any GPU+CPU heavy loads, but heavy CPU-only loads work fine (and show the system running at turbo'ed speeds on the Intel monitor.)

Will only charge with the system off.

Won't help on planes that have a hard 75W limiter, but in my experience the 90W Auto/Air adapter works great on older AA planes that have a round style outlet, and the regular 90W Latitude adapter will work on Cathay Pacific 120V plugs. I didn't have the 90W adapter with me the last time I flew AA international on one of the newer planes with 120V plugs, but I'd expect it to work there.

Have never tried this with a 65W adapter, but between the screen, 2 SSDs and the processor, I doubt the machine will run happily even playing with throttling manually.

Latitudes (and those Precision models more closely related to the Latitude line, going by my old work M4700) have a more aggressive response to a below-rated-wattage (or non-reporting) power supply than the Dell consumer line machines, and while sold as a "Precision" the M3800 is basically an XPS with an ISV-certified video chip rather than the 750M.

I've had zero problems running the M3800 with a 90W auto-air adapter, for non-gaming stuff -- it just won't charge the battery while the machine is on (it will, with the system power off); it may throttle under full GPU+CPU load, but I've compiled code while on 90W and no noticable slowdown.

[eta] By contrast, while I still had the M4700, it throttled to a barely-usable minimum performance when running with anything other than its dedicated (170W?) adapter, including even the docking-station 130W adapters we had around.

I've never seen my M3800 stay at 800mhz under load with either 90W adapter, while all the latitudes I've tried starting with the D630 generation have throttled agressively. Annoyingly, the M4700 would do that even with a 130W adapter, despite being a configuration that should have been fine with that.)

I've heard hints from our rep that this will be refreshed at the same time the XPS model is refreshed, with a Broadwell chip and an 8xxM GPU. I really doubt there will be a different screen option, or a non-touch. The touch screens add very little extra to the cost these days, so you can just disable the device if it bothers you.

(Sadly, no such easy way to get non-glare; there ARE coating sheets you can get which help, but they aren't great and I've yet to seen one which is cut to fit for this model, so you're getting a generic one and hoping it fits (or cutting it to fir yourself.)

Reflections aside, the QHD IGZO model really is a great screen.

 

To be clear for other readers, I assume you mean that the M3800 is the XPS based system, not the M4700. Your sentence could be read to indicate that you are saying the M4700 is XPS based. I also assume you mean the M4700 didn't throttle as aggressively as, unlike the XPS based M3800 and the Latitude based M4400, M4500 and M2800, the M4700 is from the ground up designed as a workstation.

 

[I'll correct that above.]

Yes to the former -- the M3800 [my current personal machine] is XPS-based, as is very clear from the construction and the BIOS. It does not throttle aggressively on either thermal or power, and runs pretty happily on a 90W supply other than not charging the battery if on [I've not tried a 65W].

No to the latter -- and I no longer have the M4700 (it's probably stuck in a drawer somewhere once I returned it; nobody else expressed interest which is why I ended up with the eval.) my comment on throttling was regarding the M3800. While the M4700 didn't thermal throttle (the last Dell model I've had which DID was the E6420, and that one not badly) while it may be designed from the ground up from a workstation from the physical form factor (pity; the lack of an bay was not IMO a plus, and having been based on the E6530 would have actually made for a better machine for our use), the M4700 throttled to basically "slow as molasses" on anything other than it's giant brick of a supply (170W?). When someone swiped the original from my work one, we tried a 130W supply which should have been plenty for a i7-3820M and whatever the base Nvidia chip was... but the machine was nearly useless stuck at 800mhz, the same behavior as Latitudes going back to at least the D830. It also shares the same basic BIOS design vs. the consumer BIOS in the M3800.

I realize for many here the availability of ever-bigger certified GPUs in the M4x00 and M6x00 are a big deal, and for personal use I like being able to play games, but for professional use I am baffled by Dell's insistence on selling a discrete GPU if I want a full quad-core CPU and/or the option of bigger memory (which is why we evaluated the M4700 -- it was the only 4 DIMM socket 15" machine Dell sold, but it was way too much heavier and bulkier than the W530 to be of interest to our main professional services team who are the big consumers of 32GB laptops.)

 

OK, I see you mean throttling due to the power supply, not due to heat. My bad!