Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Actually, the only thing we know is that someone says a service rep told them it might be possible with enough demand.

But other dell employees have posted saying it will never happen, so this is all wild speculation.


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I don't have any more concrete information than anybody else here, but I think cmoya is correct. Yes Dell is a large corporation and therefore has significant resources, but being a large corporation usually means that, unlike small companies, updates and releases are NOT simply a matter of some engineer buying a couple 16GB DIMMs on Newegg, fiddling with a little code to make things work, and then saying to his manager, "Hey, I added 16GB DIMM support to the M3800 over my lunch break today -- let's ship this update out to the world." I've worked at startups where sometimes that's EXACTLY how features were released, but trying to work with that level of flexibility/adaptability/freewheeling in a company with 100,000 employees spread out all over the world simply isn't feasible. The reality is that while the extra process involved in large companies can sometimes slow the end result, it's a necessary evil to keep reasonable track of such a large amount of activity, otherwise talk about the right hand not knowing what the left was doing.

So yes, cmoya is right that doing this would likely involve determining customer demand, then getting approval to spend engineer man-hours working on it, then buying LOTS of 16GB DIMMs to ensure broad compatibility lest customers find incompatibilities and rail at Dell for delivering a broken feature (this expenditure would be particularly tricky to justify if Dell didn't actually intend to sell such a configuration themselves for whatever reason, in which case they reap no real profit from the results), then dealing with any bugs/problems that may be encountered while developing support, etc. And at the end of all this, if for example they didn't see enough of a market for an M3800 with 32GB of RAM from the factory and therefore didn't offer a SKU thusly equiped, the only visibility from this effort and cost is a release note on a single BIOS update (which no one will ever see again after the subsequent BIOS revision is released), and maybe a note in the Tech Specs saying "16GB DIMMs supported", but I've never seen anything like that. Typically the Tech Specs only show the options that the system can actually be ordered with.

 

@ then buying LOTS of 16GB DIMMs to ensure broad compatibility@
Thats for standarts are.if your ram module is incompartible then you can just return it.

For now i didnt saw answer why it is realy impossible.

May be i am wrong, but is not programms build from some logical blocks? i mean if you invest in such block for m3800 you can use it in next gen models?

 

You'd still want to test lots of 16GB DIMMs to ensure compatibility. If you only validated that one kind of DIMM worked, how do you think that would work with your customers? They won't all just know that they need to buy some specific type of 16GB DIMM. You want to ensure the broadest compatibility possible to minimize customer frustration with your product.

I didn't say it was impossible. I just said it wasn't as trivial to do as some people seem to think.

Yes, programming does often build in logical blocks, and implementing it on this system may well pay off for future systems. But there's still a decision that has to be made as to whether investing in 16GB DIMM support right now is more important than whatever else Dell might want to do with their engineer man-hours, and maybe they'll decide that 16GB DIMM support can wait. Additionally, given that CPUs and motherboard chipsets occasionally change and include a different memory controller that may even support a completely different kind of memory (DDR4, for example), it's possible that 16GB DIMM support here would NOT benefit future systems.

 

All of the sudden I am now having the wake-from-sleep dead wifi issue. I already have the most updated drivers, so I am not sure what to do to fix this. The weird thing is that for the first few weeks of me owning the system I never had this issue, but now it has appeared out of the blue and it happens constantly.

Does anyone know what else to do to fix this other than updating drivers?

 

What do folks think of an M3800 as an Adobe powerhouse (whole Creative Cloud suite, plus Capture One)? I'm mostly a photographer, although I do some video as well. The m3800 seems to be the lightest machine that might offer the quad-core power , discrete graphics and high-res screens I'm after. The other contenders are the HP ZBook 15 g2 and the Lenovo w541, which are faster, but heavier. (I've pretty much decided against the Retina MacBook Pro due to the much higher price tag and sealed design - I can put my own memory and SSDs in anything except the Mac!). All trhe machines I'm focused on right now are workstations, but I've also considered repurposing one of the newer gaming laptops with more reasonable designs (I'm not interested in an 8 lb Sager with a 1/2 hour battery life, but might consider a Razer Blade or the new Asus with the 4k display and PCIe SSD) I'm posting similar questions in each machine's owner's thread, to get opinions from owners of each of the three on how they compare to each other, and to anything else that's out there.

 

I'm an Adobe CS user and I love it. Adobe CS taking advantage of Quadro graphics cards was one of the main reasons why I went with the M3800, as it's light yet powerful enough for my needs. I don't know what you classify as an Adobe POWERHOUSE, but it should handle pretty much all of your needs unless you are into extremely heavy video editing/video graphics.

 

I'm curious what machines with only 2 DIMM slots out there support 16+GB.

 

I've heard/read that the AMD CPUs can work with the 16GB sticks.

 

Hi, I have had problems with the Dell M3800 WiFi card. after several months of multiple brands of WiFi replacements, replacing the motherboard and even getting a refurbished Dell I still have serious internet connection issues at multiple locations where other computers do not. The speed tests run very low and the internet often just shows a white screen with the waiting spinning button. Please help. I really need the Dell M3800 to work as I need to power to run my programs and the ability to have something lightweight with my injury. In the beginning I switched internet companies at two locations, modems and routers to try to solve it later to learn that it was most likely the WiFi. Dell Tech team has been very helpful in replacing all the parts etc but it is not solving the issue and it is causing a huge loss to my recent start up business. Have you heard of this problem and the fix? I have read a few forums that mention the same problem and all of the fixes I have tried with