Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Take any of these screenshots with a grain of salt. Because the product is not available for purchase on Dell's site yet, these product pages can only be considered placeholders or works in progress while they prepare to launch. Why they were publicly accessible and why they would show up in a Google search is beyond me, but they've cut off outside access to that part of their website now.

All I know for sure is that I'll need a little more information to choose between the m3800 and the XPS-15-9530, as they are very similar, and look forward to the official release of this laptop.

Edit: Images removed. I got excited and probably overlooked the shaky legal ground this puts me on. I would greatly appreciate it if you all would remove the images in your quotes also! We'll get all the information we need in two days.

 

Does anyone know if the m3800 comes with the screen calibrated?? Or is it uncalibrated like the xps15?!

 

No problem! Done.

Not too much new info there anyway, plus it's not clear whether anything posted there can be trusted.
But it's good to see Dell is getting ready to release the M3800. Hope to get one before the holidays!

 

Questions:

1. Can I set the battery to only charge 80% for longevity? I'll be mostly plugged in, so having a full charge continuously is not good.
2. Intel lists the i7-4702HQ as operating at 2.2 GHz, with "Max Turbo" being 3.2 GHz. What does that mean? When can I expect it to run at 3.2? Short bursts only or always when connected to power?
3. Since there are two GPUs, K1100M and HD4600, can I pick either for display? And can I use the other for math processing? E.g. run graphics on HD4600 and CUDA stuff on the K1100M?
4. Any chance this will be offered, ever, with e.g. i7-4750HQ, which has triple the memory bandwidth? Perhaps without K1100M, which would probably make it cheaper.

All I can think of right now. Thanks Bokeh for doing this.

 

THANKS!

That's great news... until/unless they release a 130W Auto/Air adapter, I can live with that, and it's much better behavior than I've seen from our M4700 at work on 130W or 90W or the E6430/E6530 with 65W-- all of which refuse to budge off of the minimal low power frequency (I think 1.2ghz on all of those) and refuse to charge at all on the lower-wattage adapter.

Thanks!

XPS specs don't list it, and list HM87 rather than QM87, so there may be some other motherboard differences.

That's fairly typical, although the "lifespan" is usually before a moderate loss of capacity, not before it's totally gone (the 70% capacity mark someone else mentioned from the Samsung specs sounds about right.) I've got a similar usage cycle, and usually see batteries starting to wear out after a year. The 3-year-warranty/slightly lower capacity version of the 9-cell battery in the Latitude E6430 I got last year is doing substantially better.

For a cheaper system that will run AutoCAD very nicely, wait for a coupon and then get an M4700 off the Dell Outlet site.

Haven't seen any OEMs using the EVO drives yet, and as others have said the markup from Dell would put this at around $1000 if not $1200.

Didn't see any option like that in the BIOS. Dell hasn't been very consistent in offering the battery-profile/battery-charge-cycle-saving options in the Latitude line, but those are all Dell/Phoenix BIOS and the pre-release one I got to play with was AMI. Possible that they'd switch at release, but unlikely.

Covered by Bokeh higher up, if you want exact numbers, but like any other quad-i7 since the 2720qm, you'll only get 3.2ghz briefly ... but you should get better than the base 2.2ghz even under heavy load except under really bad thermal/power conditions. The exact continuous speed you get may vary between machines (certainly has for W530s at my work!) as some individual CPUs run a little hotter/cooler, and there's probably also some variation in the quality of assembly of the cooling system at the factory (does Dell even have their own anymore, or is it all ODM?)... and some people will disassemble those and manually repaste (although it's a warranty-voiding excercise.)

Works like any other Optimus-based system; you could do that as a programmer, with some hoops, although I don't off the top of my head know of any programs that do it (although I know of some video programs that can use either Quick Sync-based OR CUDA-based codecs.)

Conceivably possiblem, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.

 

IDK for 1-3, but for #4 i can say this:

The 4702HQ is a 37W part. The 4750HQ is a 47W part.
You DO get better memory BW and Iris Pro graphics (comparable to GT 640M - GT 645M) but you sacrifice speed (0.2 GHz) and thermals (+10W TDP)
It is also more expensive (by ca 57 USD).

Admittedly, you'll probably come out on top if you drop the dedicated GPU.
As for Precision, I see no way that a dedicated GPU gets replaced by an inferior CPGPU. It's not the core market for this range.
Maybe Dell will introduce this in another range with the same/similar form factor (XPS or Inspiron).

 

Triple the bandwidth only if you are within the 128MB Crystal Well L4 eDRAM - otherwise memory bandwidth is the same as any other Haswell.
You also lose 2MB of L3 cache to implement the L4 eDRAM - without CW the same CPU can have an 8MB L3 cache like the i7-4900MQ.

So the benefit is very workload dependent, but I would also like to see them do an Iris Pro version of the M3800 without the dGPU just to see how well it performs.

 

The Dell XPS 15 (L521x) display suffered from visible gridlines when viewing from a close distance. Does the QHD+ version of the M3800 suffer from the same issues or has this been corrected with the new higher resolution screen?

 

2. The CPU will operate in "turbo mode" as long as power is available and it doesn't get too hot. The cooling system in the Precision is good enough to allow the CPU to stay in turbo mode indefinitely. However, the "max turbo" listed is usually just for if you have one core active. If you have four cores active it will be a little lower than 3.2 GHz.

3. With Optimus enabled, the Intel HD4600 will drive the display. The K1100M will kick in when you fire up a GPU-intensive app. If the K1100M is not needed, it powers off (saving you power and battery life). Stuff rendered by the K1100M is plopped into the frame buffer on the HD4600 for display. As for which apps are used by the K1100M, that's controlled by the NVIDIA driver, they have some default profiles but you can override it on an app-by-app basis in the NVIDIA control panel. Yes, it would be possible to use the HD4600 for display and K1100M for number crunching.

 

2.7 Ghz on 4 cores long-term out of the box. 3.0 Ghz if you undervolt with Intel XTU.

I only see the HM87 listed in the specs. Link below.

http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/...Documents/dell-precision-m3800-spec-sheet.pdf