Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Yeah, it is true the 4800 & 6800 both already support more RAM. But in my industry (which is actually movie production) the need for workstation ultrabooks is extraordinarily high. Music production, video rendering, and virtual computing all either require - or could benefit from - more than 16GB of RAM. The demand is definitely not minuscule.

Plus, if a simple BIOS update (and by simple, I mean it literally involved changing a "4" to an "8" in the memory reference code) can double the maximum supported RAM, why not just include it in the next release?

 

I don't follow the movie production therefore ultrabook logic. Yes, the 3800 is slimmer and lighter than the 4800, but it also doesn't have the same level of cooling or storage capacity. If you have the need, then maybe you have to sacrifice the lightness.

Also take into account Dell won't be offering 16GB DIMMs to buyers, because the price after their markup would be ridiculous. As a result, there's almost no incentive for them to bother - again, because the number of people in your situation is minuscule.


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I think we're sort of straying from the point of my original post.

My only point was that engineering said that they will do it if there is a demand. So I am asking those who have this need (sounds like that wouldn't be you) to let tech support know to log this as a request.

 

Hi everyone! I received the new M3800.. Now I try to update drivers, but when I try to update bios it show me a pop up message "you are about to flash your bios to an older bios version. Dell does not recommend flashing your bios to an older version. Press OK button to exit.". What I have to do..? Bios file name is M3800-A07.. Thank you


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Maybe you have already A08 version or A07, so why you want update something that is already updated?

 

This seems dubious to me. A lot of people think that because they see RAM usage shoot up in Windows Task Manager that this actually means something. It doesn't. Most of the time that represents memory "requested" or tentatively allotted to a process but more often than not never used. I've wished for a long time that Microsoft removed that from Task Manager or gave a more meaningful number. Also, with SSD's as a storage medium for a page file, if you happened to actually exceed RAM usage, the penalty to Windows paging to a swap file is almost nill nowadays. Gone are the days of "thrashing."

Now MAYBE (MAYBE) if you're rendering large video files and large 3D animations that take hours to render (regardless of amount of RAM) MAYBE 16GB+ would be of some use. But those are tasks best offloaded to a server farm anyway, because at that point the bottleneck is CPU. Likewise, if you're hosting multiple VM's 16GB+ would be very handy (but also not extraordinarily needed because of the way Hypervisors manage RAM). Other than that, I find it extremely hard to believe that anybody that uses a laptop has much need for 16Gb let alone 16GB+. Sure, it doesn't hurt and might help some, but the bang-for-buck just isn't there. Just my opinion.

Besides, can you get 32gb with 2 dimm slots? Does the 4800 have 4 dim slots? It could very well be a chipset + architecture limitation. Or that the cost of a single 16GB DIMM is extraordinarily high.

 

LOL. Now it's down to A02! What the heck is going on with Dell???

 

Yup.

 

How I can check what version do I already have..?


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Hey guys,

I have a couple of keys that are falling off my M3800. I used to have a thinkpad, and could find replacement keys online and just pop them in. No site online has replacement keys for the M3800 though. Is the keyboard by chance the same as any of these other models?


DR160
E6400
HT514
M20
M40
M60
M65
M70
M90
M2400
M4300
M4400
M4500
M4600
M4700
M6300
M6400
M6500
M6600
M6700

or the XPS models:
1340
14
14Z
15
15z
16
1640
17
Adamo 13
GEN 2
L401x
L412z
L501x
L512z
L701x
L702x
M1210
M1330
M140
M1530
M170
M1710
M1720
M1721
M1730
M90
Studio 13

Thanks!