Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Thanks for your reply, i appreciate it a lot!

I'm really disappointed that by getting the 91WHr battery you are forced to include a mSATA harddrive, since it pushes the price to $1800. I'll give it some thought but i think i'll wait for the next refresh with a 5th gen i7 and maxwell quadro or find an alternative.

 

Personally, given the cost of a large mSATA drive I would still pick the 61Wh battery + second drive vs the mSATA only + 91Wh battery. I really appreciate that, unlike Apple, Dell gives us the choice. I like having a lot of storage space so the second drive is a really good thing for me.

 

If you can manage I'd wait for the refresh. You'll get a 5th generation i7, a newer NVidia card and M.2 SSD drives (probably PCI-E). The latter will be particularly important if you're in it for the long run as I suspect mSATA drives will get difficult to buy in 2 years or so and new model SSDs will be PCI-E and M.2 only.

 

Hi everybody.
My m3800's idle cpu temperature is around 50° and it gets easily hot between the keyboard and the screen. Is that normal?

 

Hey,
I have a very annoying issue with my M3800 you know it has the K1100M and the Intel HD 4600.
I use the laptop for some photo editing, designing and stuff but also very often for gaming. Since some time late in 2014 I´ve been having the problem that - despite the fact that the game went fluently for 2 hours on 60fps - the framerate drops to 30, 20 or even 5 fps just like that. Before that it worked fine. But now, its like this: I play the game at 60fps, normal graphic settings for 10 minutes, 2 minutes, 2 hours...doesn´t matter. Then, at any random point the fps drops down to, lets say, 13 fps. Then after I wait in a corner of the map (trying not to get shot too often) for a couple of minutes I might have luck and it stabilizes again back to 60fps. Sometimes I have to power off and on my laptop for it to work, but sometimes that doesn´t work.

Does anyone have any idea why that is?^^

 

Check the CPU usage when the FPS goes down. Many multiplayer games will have 2 or 3 threads running on the CPU with each handling a different part of the game's workload. If another process starts hammering the CPU while you are in a game, the FPS will slow down as it tries to track all of the elements in the scene. Let me know what the CPU usage is during normal play and when you have the slowdown.

Also, make sure you are keeping the bottom vents clear for airflow.

 

Sounds like throttling. Have you checked the GPU temperature during that time?

 

does anyone know if this laptop is due for an update anytime within the year? Like rumours of quad core broadwell or skylake?

 

There should be a refresh once Broadwell CPUs are generally available (my understanding is later this year). Precision is usually refreshed towards the end of the cycle; other Dell models will come first.

 

Hello all, I stay in Malaysia and want to buy M3800 (used). The spec as below. Is it reasonable if the price is RM5000 (around USD1400)? It still has warranty till 2017


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