Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I have the 4K screen. I've posted logs off to NVidia's support who were quite interested in the refresh issue so I guess a future driver update will sort it out, hopefully. I run some 4K GoPro videos on it and they look fine.

 

Yup. But when I say that sound- at least on mine- is almost imperceptible, I mean that you gotta be in a dead silent room to hear it. No a/c in the background, no fans, not even the fan on the laptop itself. If anything, it's no louder than the classic HDD clicking sound or cooling fans on older notebooks. My previous laptop, the Dell Studio XPS 16, definitely had the same coil whine "problem"- only much louder than my M3800- (and usually drowned out by the mechanical HDD and the fans that sounded like jet engines).

I think more than anything the M3800 suffers from the problem of being so quiet that electronic circuit board or transistor sounds like this become more perceptible. Just my opinion, but the fact that the interference from the guy's cell phone in that video (at 0:07, 0:30, & most annoying at 1:15) was more annoying than the "coil whine" makes me laugh. I can't believe so much of this thread was dedicated to this ridiculous gripe.

P.S. There might be a solution to the problem that also prolongs your battery's life. Set it to 90/60 charge policy in the BIOS. Unless you use the laptop for 5 or 6+ hours on battery regularly- like everyday- it makes sense. Ever since I set mine to that, I stopped hearing the coil whine... Not that it bothered me much to begin with.

 

[Deleted dupe post]

 

I wouldn't say the M3800 is that quiet. I use it as a desktop replacement. My desktop was custom built for quietness, had 5 large slow fans in it and was absolutely silent. The Dell fan is annoying and I find it runs more than it doesn't. It's not even a quiet fan for it's type. I put up with it, but if it was any louder it would be going back to Dell and I'd be looking to buy a different make.

 

This is a wild guess, but do you happen to have the mSATA SSD in your build? if that is indeed the case that might be the reason why your fans are on most of the time.

I did not only researched the heck out of the M3800 as a unit but of all the parts that go into it. It turns out that the mSATA SSDs shipped with the M3800, the 2013 or the 2015 edition, are the OEM version of the infamous Samsung EVO 840 line of mSATA SSDs. Among many other problems, they heat up a great deal even when it is not being used heavily.

Unfortunately the problem is due to their so called TLC NAND architecture, and despite Samsung's few attempts at fixing it through firmware updates, it remains unresolved. I should also mention that a few people who actually changed the mSATA SSD with another make and model stopped reporting the fans spinning and the M3800 heating up for no reason all the time.

 

Not sure, the order states: "400-ACEO 512GB 2.5inch SATA Solid State Drive" which I thought was a hybrid drive, but I might be wrong. I'm not a component geek However, your comments about the Samsung SSD running hot are very interesting. At some point I'd like to upgrade to a 1TB SSD Drive as I'm finding 0.5TB a bit tight.

 

If it was a hybrid it would have been a SHDD, Solid Hard Disk Drive, or SSHD, Solid Stade Hard Drive, which are the two common methods of referring to the so called hybrid hard drives.

Your M3800 supports a 2.5 inch bay for either SSD, HDD or SSHD and also a mSATA/mPCI-e port which can be used to mount different form factor SSDs. You can have either or both provided that you have the 61 Wh battery, which seems to be the case with your M3800.

Insides Marked by TakerTX posted Sep 14, 2015 at 12:17 PM

Unfortunately Samsung is the only player in the 1 TB arena when it comes to mSATA form factor. Currently the EVO 850 mSATA 1 TB is out with a completely new redesign, but the same damned TLC architecture, to replace the faulty 840. So far the users of the 850 have not reported the same problems others experienced with the 840 but there is always a chance that this one might act up as well, being the same TLC architecture and all. There are however tried and proven MLC based mSATA drives you can get at the 256 and 512 Gigabyte mark from reputable companies like SanDisk and Plextor to name a few. You can also easily swap your current 2.5 inch 512 GB SSD with a 1 TB SSD since there are many more options in the 2.5 inch form factor that you can choose from. But bear in mind that the 840 EVO architecture is faulty no matter which implementation or form factor, so you might either want to go with the 850 EVO/PRO or another manufacturer all together.

 

I have normal 2.5 Samsung EVO 840 512gb in the regular bay (non Dell- installed it myself). The mSATA slot is empty. I hardly ever hear the fans come on and only rarely when I mistakenly cause an infinite loop in some program I'm writing do I hear it crank up past the 1st, almost silent, fan speed. When I hear the fans come on past the 1st speed, I know something is wrong and I check Task Manager to see who has cranked up the CPU. Sometimes it's me, like I said, and sometimes it's some errant website running a JavaScript loop to do whatever it thinks it wants to do. Most of the time the fans are at speed 0- not on. Also, playing video and stuff like that does not crank up the fans or the CPU.

Craig100: I would study Task Manager to see who is keeping your CPU at full speed rather than letting it step down to 50% ghz (notebookreview right here, for instance, has horrendous ads that keep the CPU from powering down). And, if you're using it as desktop replacement, I'd recommend not keeping the lid closed.

Perhaps it's because my Studio XPS 16 was so loud that I find the m3800 to be miraculously silent. I'm sure if I was coming from an even quieter MacBook Air or similar, I might feel differently.

 

What games are you playing that don't get the fans going? Must be something pretty lightweight?

 

I said video. Not video games. Having said that, I've played Asphalt 8: Airborne from the app store and even after 10 minutes the fans don't go past speed 1 (although both do come on).... barely noticeable. I mean BARELY noticeable.

An infinite DoLoop in JS or C#, zipping a huge file, or encoding a video (all of which crank the CPU into turbo mode) will cause my fans to kick in to high gear. And, yes, THEN they are noticeable. So I know they work. Other than that, 99% of the time, running Visual Studio, even playing a TV show on another monitor while I work, the laptop is silent (and cool).

Core i7-4702HQ 2.20Ghz (3.2Ghz) /16gb RAM / Samsung Evo 840 2.5 512GB / Empty mSATA slot.
FHD screen. Perhaps pushing pixels on the 3K/4K screens is a different story?