Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Also, you could check whether you have NFC.

 

Looks like a refurbished machine: M3800 innards in an XPS chassis.

 

Hello guys, wanted share with you my story.

Bought Dell Precision M3800 in august with QHD+ display and NBD Pro Support.
I had both dead pixels and coil noise issue.
At January after speaking with my colleagues I have decided to call to dell support and report both issues - wrong decision here --
1st day) technician came to my office, replaced both motherboard and display. Replaced display had 5 dead pixels
2nd day) technician came to my office, replaced display. Replaced display had 8 dead pixels.
At Friday evening, I brought my laptop home and turned it on - nothing happened, power control lid for a moment and than it turned off.
Called to support phone - they told me to take off battery told them, that this laptop has battery build in. After moment they suggested to Hold Function Key while powering on - it helped
Today) technician came to replace display for the 3rd time , again 3 dead pixels. Luckily the problem with laptop turn on came again and he saw it. After long call with support, they decided to take time to discuss this in private.
After 30 minutes they called that they will come for the 4th time with new motherboard and new display. Not to mention that the current one has coil noise issue as well.

I am full of expectations what will happen tomorrow, and I will report you back to the issue.
But just to sum up I have allready came with the conclusion - that Dell has made a wrong move here, when they decided to re-brand home laptop dell xps 15 and turn it into business workstation machine.

David

 

Or maybe a simple firmware flash can turn XPS15 into a M3800.

 

I have had my Precision M3800 for a few weeks now - top of the line specs. I hesitated for a year because of the concerns discussed in these forums, but our Dell rep lent me one for a few days and I liked it. Here are some impressions.

The computer is gorgeous in terms of the case, screen, graphics, and functional aspects of the keyboard and trackpad. I hear no "coil whine," there are no dead pixels, and no parts seem defective. I like the touch screen, and while I have mixed feelings about Windows 8.1, the touch screen is worth the adjustment. I am happy with the purchase. Battery life (larger battery) is around 6 hours of office work with reasonable screen brightness (around 1/3 of max, the screen is very bright). It is easy to open the case with a T5 screwdriver if you need to upgrade anything.

Best upgrade: I bought a Samsung Evo 840 mSata 1 TB drive, cloned my original drive to it (Casper), installed it myself, and turned on Rapid Mode using Samsung Magician software. Sequential read and write times doubled, random times increased around 10%. Awesome.

Negatives: the keyboard has a great, light touch (for me), but it is a shame to have to use fn keys for constant functions like home and end. I understand the problem of fitting so much into the chassis, but this was a poor decision. I can live with it personally, because I like typing on it better than on the Thinkpads I used for years. Also, the touchpad looked greasy within days, and can't be restored with alcohol. Poor choice of materials. I like the touchpad, though, very smooth and responsive. I can tap lightly for a left click, and it is easy to use the clickpad - no problem adjusting from a Thinkpad.

Minor issues:
My old laser printer works off the two usb3 ports on the left, but not off the usb2 or usb3 port on the right. USB2 flash drives work on all ports, as does a Patriot Gauntlet USB3 external 2.5" enclosure and also my old Dell color laser printer. But two almost identical mSata enclosures - Sabrent and Kingwin, both with ASMedia 1053e chipsets - worked only off USB2. But I can put an mSata into a Syba mSata->Sata III (2.5") adapter (which uses the same chipset) and put that into the Patriot, and that works great and is very fast for cloning. Dell pro support (recommended in terms of responsiveness) worked for a long time to help but couldn't figure out this weird pattern of USB behavior, which could be hardware but more likely Windows or firmware problems. I am not too upset because the ports do actually work and there is the Syba workaround. Most people would be satisfied with an SSD or corporate backup. Kingwin has been responsive and is also investigating. Syba has also been a good company to work with in terms of responding to questions rapidly.

So far, a much better experience than suggested by many posts in this forum, a few minor disappointments, but no other Windows laptop meets my requirements of a fast quad core cpu, huge ssd, max memory, great touch screen and under 5 pounds with good battery life. I will let you know if any more problems develop, but so far so good.

 

So is there any real confirmation that the m3800 won't be receiving any upgrades other than resolution? I know what has been reported about the XPS 13, but I haven't seen any official news regarding the Precision m3800.

 

Subject: Should I risk changing (currently coil whine free) motherboard to fix lack of Sleep functionality? Is there an alternative way to fix this issue?

Thanks to the help from this forum I got an M3800 late Oct 2014 and have used it with no issues (512GB SSD, i7-4712HQ, 16GB RAM, 1920x1080, 91Wh battery). No coil whine which I was very happy about.

Couple of days ago the Sleep functionality stopped work. If I closed the lid and then later reopened lid, a simple press of the power button would not resume from sleep (a restart was required, meaning all open apps/work lost). If I left the lid open the M3800 would not go to sleep.

I phoned Dell ProSupport. Very helpful guy. I’m no tech expert, but after testing a few things, the bottom line was the solution to get the Sleep functionality to work was to replace the motherboard (I think ProSupport have encountered same problem before). He said on some PCs you would be able to fix the problem via BIOS, but not on the M3800 (he said he had checked this).

Given the well documented issues with coil whine, the idea of changing the motherboard was not something I wanted to jump into without some thought. The Dell tech was aware of the coil whine issue and understood. He said it was entirely up to me if I wanted the motherboard replaced (he said he thought most of the old motherboards had been purged from service stock, but could not guarantee I would definitely get the “revised” motherboard). We discussed other options, which included using Hibernate instead of Sleep, or not using Sleep at all.

At this stage I am using the M3800 purely as a laptop, but I intend to buy an external monitor at which time my main setup/usage would be using the external monitor with the laptop lid closed and plugged in to power.

I would be very grateful for any views from the forum on the following questions (FYI I have circa 4 years left on ProSupport warranty):

1) The ProSupport tech was very helpful, but given the expertise on this forum I thought it worth checking if there are any other ways to get Sleep to work other than replacing the motherboard?

2) Views on what is the best option for me?

a) Change the motherboard and hopefully get Sleep functionality back but risk getting coil whine (what have people’s experience been of changing motherboards with regard to coil whine)?

b) Don’t replace motherboard and live without Sleep functionality (seems a shame given how new/expensive M3800 is). I could use Hibernate in place of Sleep (with a c. 20 second slower resume time), or simply not use Sleep at all. Are there any issues with using Hibernate instead of Sleep (other than time delay)? Are there any issues with not putting M3800 to either Sleep or Hibernate all day, every day (I would Shut Down or Hibernate overnight)?

3) If I do go down replacing the motherboard route, anything I should be aware of to make process as smooth as possible? I read on the Dell Community Forum you should get a paper card a new Windows product key. Anything else (I have BitLocker enabled, etc.)?

 

Typically sleep issues are caused by problematic applications or drivers. Make sure you're running the latest driver releases, particularly for the motherboard chipset, Intel and NVIDIA GPUs, AHCI/RAID (get F6 x64 package), WiFi, and attached devices. Also grab the latest BIOS release. Then if you haven't already, see whether sleep and resume work better while all USB devices are disconnected and/or when you've minimized the number of applications running in the foreground or background. And lastly, you didn't specify whether you've got Intel Rapid Start enabled. If so, get rid of it given that you have the 512GB SSD version. In any case, I'm not confident a motherboard replacement would fix your Sleep issue if it broke all of a sudden as opposed to having been broken from the beginning.

But if you decide to just live without Sleep, I don't see any problems with using Hibernate instead, other than the inconvenience as you say. There's also no real problem leaving the system running even 24/7 without ever really shutting down; I've done that with my systems for years.

In any case, I would definitely steer clear of a new motherboard. It won't have the embedded Windows 8.1 key like the original board, so you'll need to keep the paper copy that the repair tech should provide for you (or save it elsewhere) rather than being able to do a rebuild without having that handy. There's also always a risk that the repair tech will mess something up during the replacement, and as you say, you might end up with coil whine, which would be especially irritating if the new motherboard also fails to even cure the sleep issue, which I suspect is fairly likely. I requested a motherboard replacement to fix coil whine and the replacement was coil whine free, but plenty of others have gotten swaps with no change in behavior or even worse coil whine than before, particularly people outside the US.

If you do go with a motherboard replacement, make sure to jump into the BIOS on first boot and configure it appropriately, e.g. Legacy or UEFI mode to match your current board's configuration. BitLocker will definitely not be happy after the replacement. But to fix that, enter your Recovery Key for the first boot, then open an elevated Command Prompt and enter these two commands:

manage-bde –delete -protectors C: -type TPM
manage-bde –protectors –add C: -tpm

 

Agreed - I would start with the BIOS and video drivers.

 

Hello everyone,
I have been looking at the M3800 for nearly a year now, but restrained from buying, due to several factors.
Now, that custom configurations are available, I have yet again become interested in the M3800.
What I want is a thin, light and relatively powerful laptop, with graphics providing good OpenGL support. I mainly run Rhino and pre-/post processing and light CFD simulations. All of these applications are OpenGL based. I also intend to run Linux, and the M3800 seems like a good machine for that. And the M3800 is one of very few machines filling my requirements (also the MSI WS60, but that is 1200$ more here), so it is not like I am spoilt for choice...

But now, I am worried that the M3800 is getting a bit old. Reading above, it seems the major upgrade being discussed for the M3900 is higher screen resolution, and since I intend to get the FHD screen, this is of little concern to me. Also, with the Broadwell delay (especially for higher TDP CPUs), it seems this may take a while.

Do you think the M3800 is a good machine for my use profile?
Do you think there is a reason not to buy the M3800 given the systems relative age?

Best regards,
Adam