Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Yes, the Outlet is frequently restocked, but new stock also often gets snapped up quickly, so check frequently and move fast once you find a system with the specs that you want. And unless you specifically need a Quadro rather than GeForce GPU, you would also likely get more results by broadening your search to include the XPS 15. Good luck!

 

hadaak, I am trying to upgrade to the same Samsung 1TB mSATA drive but having all kinds of trouble. I cannot see the mSATA in the BIOS under any combination of settings. When I try a a clean install of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, the installer can see the drive but gives an error saying Windows cannot install to it. Can you share your BIOS settings and anything you did to get the drive working?

 

What's the model of the Samsung 1tb drive. How much did it cost you?

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Usually if Windows says it can't install to the drive, it will tell you why, e.g. you're trying to install the OS in UEFI mode onto a disk with MBR layout or install it in Legacy mode onto a disk with GPT layout. More details about the error would be helpful, but in the meantime here's what should work for you:

1. Set the SATA mode to AHCI in the BIOS. Also set the boot mode to UEFI (rather than Legacy) and if you'll be using Windows 8, enable Secure Boot. If you'll be using Windows 7, disable Secure Boot and enable Legacy Option ROMs. Windows 7 doesn't get any real benefit being installed in UEFI mode the way Windows 8 does, but it doesn't hurt either.

2. Make sure your bootable media supports UEFI booting and make sure you actually boot the device in UEFI mode. Windows 7 media requires some extra steps to support UEFI booting, and if you have Legacy Option ROMs enabled in your BIOS and boot media created a certain way it's technically possible to boot a UEFI-capable installer in Legacy mode, which will cause the OS to be installed in Legacy rather than UEFI mode. If you have Secure Boot enabled your only options will be UEFI booting, so that would be a non-issue, though of course you have to make sure you created your boot media in a way that supports UEFI boot. Take a look at this page from the XPS 15 Wiki: Create a Windows Install USB - XPS 15 Wiki.

3. When you get into the installer, press Shift+F10 to open Command Prompt. From there enter these commands:
diskpart
list disk (note here the number of the disk corresponding to your SSD)
select disk X (where X is the number you noted above)
clean
exit
exit

That will wipe your SSD and allow the installer to set it up as GPT for a proper UEFI installation.

 

I am waiting on delivery of an M3800 (thanks for everyone’s pre-purchase help).

I know this is a dumb question, but I am not an IT expert.

I am going to buy an external monitor. The external monitor would be the primary monitor with the M3800 screen either off (lid closed) or used as a secondary screen (Extend Mode).

Is there any issue with buying a 16:10 aspect ratio external monitor given the M3800 screen is 16:9?

I guess the crux of my question is when I am viewing the content on the primary 16:10 external display, will the different content on the 16:9 M3800 screen appear without there being any distortion (i.e. will each screen display images independently at their own aspect ratios)?

FYI, following advice from the forum I went for 1920x1080 screen on the M3800 (best for my ageing eyes), so this question is not about the QHD vs. FHD per display scaling issues I have read about.

My current plan is to buy a 1920x1200 monitor, possibly the new Dell U2415 once I have seen some reviews. I think the extra vertical height of the 1920x1200 would be useful.

 

If you're using only one display at a time or you're using multiple displays in Extend mode, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. In that scenario, as long as you're ok using the same DPI scale factor on all active displays, then the exact resolutions of the active displays don't matter at all because they're displaying different content. You will be able to select whatever individual resolutions you want for each individual display without affecting the other displays at all. Worst case is that your desktop background image might look weird on some displays, but there are even apps to deal with that if that bugs you. HOWEVER, note that Windows may not default to using 100% scaling on the built-in panel even though it's FHD. If it doesn't, then you can end up with some scaling blurriness (different from aspect ratio distortion) on your non-primary display. To fix that, just set the "Use a single scale factor for all displays" option, select 100% (or whatever you want), log off and back on, and then you'll be golden. Alternatively, you could start by testing the per-display scaling option, which might introduce SOME fuzziness on your non-primary display (this is different from aspect ratio distortion), but since the scale factor discrepancy between the two displays wouldn't be as drastic as if you had a QHD+ panel, it might still be tolerable, especially if you can't find a single scale factor that you're happy with on both the built-in and external panels.

The only time the stretching issue you describe would come into play would be if you decided to run multiple displays of different aspect ratios in mirror mode. In that case, your maximum selectable resolution is the highest resolution supported by all active displays, which would be 1920x1080 in your scenario. So if you select that resolution, the other panel (which has the 1920x1200 native resolution) will either stretch that 1920x1080 content vertically to fill its entire display area, or it will display black bars above and below the content to preserve the proper aspect ratio of the content it's mirroring. In your case since the 1920x1200 display will be the external unit, you decide which of those behaviors you want by playing with the OSD settings on the display itself (choosing "Fill" or "Aspect" scaling). If it were the other way around (1920x1080 external display and a 1920x1200 built-in panel that would be performing scaling), you would either have to use driver settings to manage the built-in panel scaling options (if they're available) or just accept whatever the built-in display was configured to do. Some systems have their built-in panels set to always fill the entire panel no matter what the input resolution, and others are set to always preserve the content's aspect ratio. I believe the M3800 is the latter type.

 

I frequently use a 1920x1200 display with my M3800. Honestly it's not ideal. Windows scaling doesn't work that well. It does scale but take Solidworks as an example. Lines that are clearly say 2 pixels wide, are scaled on the second screen and look fuzzy. This means the second screen, the one I would want to use as a primary display doesn't look good. Actually, what it looks like is when you run an LCD at a non-native resolution. The text and lines are always fuzzy. You can get around this if you turn off per monitor scaling but then you either have very small text on the 15" screen or very large text on the other screen. Also, I have issues with Solidworks and external displays. I suspect this is a problem with the hybrid graphics. What happens is when you try to spin a model the display window glitches. It corrects quickly but it still is quite annoying. I haven't tried turning off the Intel GPU to see if this corrects the issue.
Ray

 

The poster above said he ordered the FHD built-in panel, not QHD+ as you seem to have, so blurriness caused by the per-display DPI scaling wouldn't apply. But in your case, if you want your external panel to look better, set it as the primary display and then log off and back on, though then of course your built-in panel will look upscaled. Unfortunately this is just the state of the industry when it comes to simultaneously driving displays with radically different pixel densities, both on the PC and Mac side.

You can't turn off the Intel GPU. Unlike some other Optimus systems, all display outputs in this system are wired to the Intel GPU, and the NVIDIA GPU is a render-only device -- so when the NVIDIA GPU is engaged, it still has to pipe the output to the Intel GPU, which then acts as a passthrough to the display. If you're seeing glitches, it's probably Intel GPU driver-related.

 

JP,
I think I will give your suggestions a try next week when I'm back in the office.

 

Hello all,

I'm new to graphics processing. I recently started doing renderings using Solidworks and Photoview 360 2010. When I am in the rendering environment the fans come on and the CPU usage jumps up toward 100% and stays relatively high for a few minutes. I am rendering a very simple single part.

Is this normal? I thought with the dedicated graphics card it should handle these types of things no problem?

Is there a way to check if the Nvidia graphics card is kicking in?

Thanks