Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Give it time, if it's anything like the XPS 15 the SKUs are fluctuating everywhere. For a while in the US the XPS 15 in the Home store had only the bottom and mid-level SKUs and the Business store had only the top-level SKU, and now both stores have all 3. If you can't wait, try to place an order for what you want over the phone; you may even be able to get a configuration that isn't available on any region's website.

 

On the US site we get a warning that the 91Whr battery may delay shipment.

 

I'm going to wait for confirmation on which one is bootlable. I already had an issue with this, with dell. Also, I'm not sure how beneficial a hybrid drive is as a secondary/ storage only drive.

 

They'll both technically be bootable, but granted it may arrive with the regular drive actually configured as the boot volume, in which case you'd have to wipe the system to change it around to use mSATA instead. A Dell rep already confirmed in either this thread or the XPS 15 thread that systems spec'd with full-size mSATA drives (as opposed to the 32GB units intended only for caching) always use the mSATA drive for booting.

I'd just order the hardware you want and sort out any configuration changes as needed, especially since I'm not sure what confirmation you're hoping for. There are lots of occasions of different reps saying different things or everyone saying the same thing and all of them turning out to be wrong, so it's entirely possible you'll get "confirmation" of one possibility and see the other in reality.

 

Well, yes. But I wanted the ability to have fast boot (altough the mSATA on the m4700 is SATA II), bulk storage and optical drive. This would be the optimum to avoid carrying additional items (DVD reader or external drive).

With time (and additional budget), the SSD went to to the primary bay, the optical drive went in, and the bulk storage went to the mSATA.

 

It would be illogical to designate a slower drive of the two to be the boot/OS/programs drive. (In fact, basically, all I need is two functional SATA ports/slots for me to put whatever I want in them.)

The frequently used files will be sitting in the flash cache and can be accessed much faster.

 

You can custom-configured any way you like. mSATA drive can be used for storage, and 5400rpm spinner can be used as a boot drive, whatever...

In most of my recent notebooks, mSATA SSD for boot, SATA 2.5" SSD in main bay for fast storage and SATA 2.5" HDD in optical bay for slower storage. No big deal.

 

Sorry if this is repeated. Has there been any claim to battery life of the 6-cell or 9-cell. Nothing shown on the dell website of first post of this thread.

Also, I don't see a 9-cell option on the default US dell site either.

*update - I see Bokeh said 4-6 hours with the 6-cell

 

Hello, I'm French and here (in France) we can have the new XPS 15 "Platinum" with mSATA SSD 512 GB and 91WHr battery. Moreover it is the only option for now online here.
So in France:
XPS 15 with mSATA SSD 512 gb, 91WHr battery, 2.01 kg and Nvidia GeForce GT 750M to 2187 €
M 3800 with mSATA SSD 256 gb, 61WHr battery, 1.88 kg and Nvidia Quadro K1100M to 1999 €
The difference in weight is 0.13 kg.
Probably due to the battery because I think that the rest of the config is the same excatement between XPS 15 and M3800.
Bench and graph charts shows that the GT 750m is really best at the K1100m.

XPS = best price, best ssd, best battery, best Graphic card, so ...
Sorry for my bad english

 

There is no "9-cell" battery. There's a 6-cell 61Whr battery, and a 6-cell 91Whr battery.