Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Is there a way to get the NVidia K2100M card vs the K1100? The K1100 looks a little long in the tooth for multiple monitors. I guess this ws is not made for multiple monitors :-(

 

the K2100M is not available in the M3800. I believe the GPU is integrated to the point where you can't swap in a replacement yourself.

That said, I have K1100M in my M4800 driving 3 1080p monitors and it hasn't given me any trouble at all.

 

Thanks Aaron, but that is a weak conclusion since you have one at work and yet bought a K5000 for your ws at home.

I am assuming you are doing CAD work, and that may not be too demanding since it is largely static. But in a trading application, up to a half million tics (trades) can be dumped on you within a few seconds. And within those few seconds, you could be losing thousands of dollars if your system freezes, which CAD users can just go take a dump and then come back: no problem.

From reading posts, many newbies talk about freezing up, until later they see it is a common occurrence. The video card seems to be a major bottleneck considering the rest of the pipeline looks strong as possible (SSD, 1866 RAM, and i7-4xxx processor.)

From previous experience with Dell trading workstation towers, they are difficult to integrate and every system has a MAJOR bottleneck that may not be fixed. The video card seems to be the worst, and the BEST possible video card seems to be the K2100: whether that is good enough remains to be seen, but it is definitely the best possible on a 15" Dell WS.

That is the DELL dilemma of blowing thousands of dollars and then find out you have to go to a MSI ws to get a quality video card. You always look to the masses in demand to find the leading edge products like racing in vehicles. In computers, GAMING is what moves the industry, and the technology is in VIDEO cards. Business pc's are a lagging effort if that to keep up with technology. Of course they get the benefit of SSD -IF they even fit with other technologies because of obtuse engineering or a lack of any at all (?), but not the best ram and video cards due to systems artificially rejecting high tech/economical tech solutions. The bottom line is a maze of obstacles that leads to the ultimate bottleneck after you have spent your last dollar!

It is not worth the man-days figuring out what components can be used with what DELL system (in my application) if I cannot even get the best solutions available under $3500; and then, that is a large gamble to overcome 'proprietary' secrets for an ultimate reliable AND lethargic AND expensive systems. I knew a young Australian trader who had a cheap crap Amd system and he could beat many/most of the expensive workstations in response time trading while they are locking up in market move points. I would not go as far as to get an Amd, but I can smell the coffee on the video cards (and ram, and SSD's.)

 

(I presume this "Review" thread takes the place of an M3800 Owners' Lounge thread, as I cannot find one.)

I've just bought an M3800 with Windows 8.1.

I am having trouble assigning Fn keys as shortcut keys for my two screen-capture programs, Debut Video Capture and Bandicam. This is something that is covered in the software setups and I've been doing for the past several years on Dell Precisions and Alienwares, and non-Dell machines, all running Windows 7. I use F6 and F8 in Bandicam and F9 to F11 in Debut, so that I can stretch out to the laptop and control Record/Stop/Snapshot by hitting one key.

Dell will not tell me if the Fn keys on this model should be reconfigurable, they only say "it's an ultra-book so the layout is different". (I made the mistake of querying the missing Pause/Break key and the non-functional Home and End keys at the same time. To make matters worse, the M3800 support guy sounded as tho he was on the moon, when I eventually got thru to the right department and when I could hear him at all.)

Bandicam was able to set the Space bar as a shortcut for Start/Stop - however, when it is used it activates screen-scroll in the next-door browser!

I've tried adding Ctrl+Fn* into the mix to see if that would work, it doesn't, and anyway it's not practical for me to have to use two hands.

Is there anyone here who knows what I'm talking about and who has experience of making use of the Fn keys?

This has come as an awful shock, it means that the laptop is just going to be a good-looking screen to find some use for, and I don't know what that could be cos I don't watch football or movies on a laptop

 

I'm not sure if we have an official owner's lounge, but in any case, both the review and owner's thread have been used interchangeably, so feel free to go ahead anyways. This coming from the mod who's most active in this section.

@ yjacket2001, I guess the best way, would be to find something with a similar video workload and have people try it out on their K1100M. The thing that I would say is likely to be a problem is the number of video out on the M3800 and you DO NOT want to do video through USB is latency is an issue, even USB 3.0.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that the Quadro and Firepro cards in the Precisions are definitely aimed more towards CAD than other types of workloads. If you were to get a Precision laptop, in your case, the M4800 seems a better choice. In your case, I'd be curious as to whether the main issue with latency would be caused by a lack of memory bandwidth, high res multiple monitors can sometimes be surprisingly memory bandwidth hungry even when not gaming. In your case, you may end up better served by a faster consumer gaming card than a Quadro or Firepro card.

also, Aaron was right, the K1100m in the M3800 is soldered to the motherboard. The M4800 and M6800 have MXM cards, but not their smaller and thinner brother.

 

Thanks for the feedback. The MAX Precision tower of 2002 contributed to my bankruptcy trading. Brokers all over the world know how to temporarily stun workstations helpless while they take their money.

I am going to try a MSI GS60 w/6gb GTX 970 (-064 model) with 4720 I7 processor, and maybe 1866 ram if I can get it confirmed as to the results. Video cards is where it's at for trading Futures online, and workstations have an adversarial bottleneck that stops every time y0u need it: painful memories :-(

 

As no-one here gives a flying fig about my predicament *scowl* I will post about the discovery I made a short while ago:

Dell (in common with other manufacturers of touch-screen 8.1 laptops, I imagine) has commandeered several Fn keys (not combined with any other keys, which have other functions) to do silly things like activate the sidebar for Search, etc.

I need to know how to "disable" these and free up the Fn keys so they can be used by other programs.

Maybe if no-one here can help, they know a man who can?

 

Honestly, I have no idea how to do what you're asking. It is possible that you may not be able to achieve this though. One thing I know is that the BIOS for the M3800 is from AMI while previous and other current Precisions and Alienwares use Phoenix BIOSes, so if those settings are somewhere in the BIOS, you may not be able to alter them like you used to be able to before.

 

i made a tutorial howto to hack an AMI bios with no effort at all. Just look at it. Here is the link.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...mod-pcie-3-0-lid-mod-power-button-mod.773520/

Have fun,

I also ordered a DELL M3800. The new versions have Thunderbolt 2.0 now. So a EGPU Setup will be possible. Now the GPU bottleneck problem shouldn`t be a Problem at all. Will post more info when i get my ws

 

It looks like autohotkey can intercept these keys.
For example, the very simple script:
Browser_Search::a
means that the system enters an 'a' when you press FnF9.

I was also able to add a function to the brightness button by using:
sc105::a
but it did not stop the system from changing the brightness.

autohotkey can tell you the codes of any keys that you press (so that you can reference the one you want to change the function of).