Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I don't know if you're also watching the XPS 15 Haswell thread, but fwiw, a leaked Dell product roadmap I found online a while ago shows that the XPS 15 won't be refreshed until Q4 2015 -- so if that's accurate and the plans don't change significantly, AND the new XPS 15 and new M3800 (or whatever the successor is named) share a common design again, you'll probably be waiting a while for the next generation. I think the M3800 took another month or so to release even after the XPS 15, too.

 

Ok, I have missed that, definitely interesting information, thank you. I feel very tempted to buy one of these. The laptop market seems to be continuing towards true ultrabook machines with ULV CPU:s, like the recently announced Lenovo W550s or the HP ZBook 15u, which only offers a slight performance improvement (15-20%) over my old MacBook Pro. Not very impressive by my standards. One giant leap in performance for my applications would be DDR4, since CFD generally becomes memory bandwidth limited with the fastest available CPU:s today, but I guess where into at least 2016 before we will se DDR4 in laptops.

The M3800 seems to be roughly 4 times faster than my MBP, in multi-core benchmarks, and the CFD solvers I am running would benefit fully from the multi-core performance. However, the picture I have gotten from reviews is that the M3800 can sustain base clock speeds under full CPU-load only, but not TurboBoost speeds. Is this correct, from your experience?

EDIT: Have any of you tried the new AC7260 drivers posted on Dells website today?
Does this driver fix the WiFi problems reported here?

Thank you,
Adam

 

Bokeh (the OP of this monster thread) has probably provided more technical information than any other single contributor in this thread, and he found that he was able to stay consistently in the Turbo Boost clock speeds. If you were maxing out both the CPU and GPU at the same time, you might encounter some throttling, but Bokeh hasn't ever found any -- and real-world usage seldom maxes out the CPU and GPU simultaneously. Throttling was mentioned more in the XPS 15 thread a while ago, but that could be because evidence suggests that its GPU is clocked a bit higher, though of course it lacks the Quadro-specific features that would make a far greater performance impact on applications that use them. However, throttling hasn't been mentioned for a while over there now, so even those issues might have been resolved with drivers, BIOS, or perhaps doing a better job of applying thermal paste at the factory.

For the WiFi drivers, I always get mine from Intel. I'm on their latest release and I'm not seeing any problems, but I wasn't seeing any before either. Which problems are you referring to? There were a fair number of issues back when this system was first released, but that was MANY driver releases ago and Intel seems to have sorted all of that out. There are still a few people here or there with random issues in certain specific scenarios, but those reports don't seem to be more than you would normally expect to find on any system given enough users and enough time.

 

Thank you very much for your detailed answers!
The situation regarding throttling seems promising. As my CFD-applications only load CPU, I think I should be ok! The GPU will be used for Rhino and the pre/post processing, and these are not terribly CPU-hungry, so no simultaneous CPU+GPU loading in my use.

Alright, good to hear. Having read most of this massive thread, following it basically since it started, I am having a hard time keeping track of the developments time-wise, sorry. Very encouraging to hear your experiences, seems like time (and Dell, Intel, and you users!) has worked its magic and resulted in a rather mature, stable system. Might order one today...

Best regards,
Adam

 

Do consider that you aren't looking at a Mac. That means the price drops over time as anticipation for the new model comes out. So rather than paying the ~$2300 that I paid for my mid line M3800 when they first came out, you can now pay quite a bit less for the same system.

 

Have you tried running windows in safe mode and seeing whether sleep mode works in safe mode? The other option is seeing whether you have a restore point from before the problem started, restoring to that point to see whether that fixes it. You should be able to undo that restore if you find it makes no difference.

 

While I've found that from Windows 7 onward, System Restore can actually be useful and not cause more problems than it solves, I don't think you can roll back the rollback, so to speak. I haven't tested it myself, but I wouldn't count on that option being available.

 

If I remember correctly, I have gone back and forth using System Restore.

 

With desktop monitors, Dell actually has a policy of replacing monitors with used ones instead of new ones if a customer asks for replacement later than 21 days (not sure of the number off the top of my head) after purchase.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they had similar policy with regard to laptop displays. If that were true, they might just try to slip you displays someone else asked to be replaced…

 

A few questions for fellow M3800 owners:

1. How accurate do your colors get once calibrated? I'm seeing an average delta e of 0.99 with a max of ~3. I'm using a lowsy Spyder 4 with dispcalGUI, so I know my tools aren't the best (the probe at least).

2. I notice that when I resume from sleep my screen has a red cast to it and requires a restart to go back to normal. Any idea what could be causing this? EDIT: I just updated my intel drivers which, after installing, returned the screen to normal, but after a restart and a sleep/wake the problem returned. Based on this I believe the issue to be intel driver based.

3. I have to unplug the power cable to be able to turn on the machine. If it's plugged in, the keyboard blinks and the power light eventually goes black again. Any ideas as to why this is?

4. Is there any way to have the keyboard remain lit when on battery? By default it turns off after so long, likely for better battery usage, but I notice that once it turns off I get some ear-piercing coil whine that gives me a headache. I've since developed a habit of touching the touchpad to re-light it when it begins to dim.

I really wish I either had worse hearing or the machine didn't have this noise problem. It's been an ordeal since day one and Dell seems unable to actually fix it.

Thanks in advance