Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

It does. It also supports SLAT, which is required to use Hyper-V on Windows 8.

 

Anyone else concerned with lack of support for hiDPI and windows 8.1 for a lot of industry software?

I use Autodesk and Adobe products and the support forums seem littered with people complaining about incompatibilities.

Anyone taking the plunge in the hope that these issues will be resolved soon?

 

Quick question. As the only difference between the the XPS 15 and M3800 seems to be the GPU, and the GPU on the M3800 has a slightly lower TGP than the XPS15, does that mean that the M3800 would have a slightly better battery life? Or, would there be practically no difference, particularly if you're not doing anything particularly demanding and therefore mainly using the Intel card? Thanks!

 

Nope because, it's assumed that to have better battery life you only use Intel GPU.

 

I'm taking the plunge hoping things will get sorted out. I'm not really willing to get a regular DPI display on a laptop at this point since I'll be keeping it for several years, so I figure some early glitches will be well worth having HiDPI once the industry comes around. I'll also be using an external display as primary most of the time (can't wait until affordable HiDPI 24-27" displays come out....), but worst case I figure I can just drop the resolution down to 1600x900 when I'm working with a problematic app, which is a perfect 2:1 pixel mapping in each dimension, so there will be zero scaling artifacts. That's a bit less real estate than I'm used to so maybe 1920x1080 would be better, but in any case I would hardly consider HiDPI an insurmountable problem at this point. At worst it's just something that at certain times you'll really want to take advantage of but won't be able to because of a problematic application, but I'm not willing to cripple my laptop's hardware spec because of some slow developers.

 

I'm hoping that it looks ok at 1080P. I'll be running external displays as well so it won't be a big issue for me most of the time.

It should get sorted relatively quickly with the industry seeming to go this direction.

 

Note that, unless you need separate DPI scaling on multiple monitors attached to the laptop, for professional use Windows 7 is the only rational choice. Windows 8.x has no significant benefits of any kind, but a number of substantial drawbacks in the area of compatibility. Which is why Win7 remains the default choice on all professional workstations that OEMs are selling.

 

Ok, so I am very close to pulling the trigger on this M3800, but wanted a few opinions. So i do mainly 3D work in Cinema 4D, post work in After Effects, and obviously tons of Photoshop stuff. I, like many, am debating between the 3800 and the rMBP. It seems the consensus is that the Mac is a great machine But the main beef is that is has a propensity to overheat and throttle, which is kind of a deal breaker for me. The Dell on the other hand from some peoples perspective, say that that CPU is under powered at 2.2 GHz. Now... I am def. not a super techie numbers guy, but from some professionally opinions out there would you think the 3800 is going to be a good machine for the aforementioned work that i do?

So... right now i have a Dell Studio XPS 1645, with i7 Q820 @ 1.73 ghz. So... I know the m3800 is newer and obviously better, but is the CPU in the 3800 vastly superior than my current one? All i really want to hear is "this laptop will destroy your old piece of crap, do it now." Also... I have the RGBLED display that was for a brief time an option on the 1645, and i like it a lot. it is maybe a bit over saturated, esp. in the reds, But I'm wondering how the Display on the 3800 will measure up. Does anyone know the difference in color gamut coverage from the xps1645 rgbled vs. the m3800. Lastly... I know one can not say for sure, but do you think Software Companies will start updating their programs to work well with the High Dpi of these new machines? I would think things are already starting to be updated due to the Retina display, so just kinda wondering if anyone can guestimate when Adobe and Maxon (cinema 4d) will have support for high Dpi.... Thanks for any info, opinions. etc...

 

The new CPU will be vastly superior to your current one; the performance gap will be far larger than the clock speed gap suggests because most of the performance gains over the last several years have been from generational architecture changes to the Intel Core CPUs, and yours is about 4 years and several generations old now.

Can't speak to the display more than what bokeh has already mentioned, but he said that this one covers all of sRGB and isn't quite as saturated as the RGBLED display in the M6700 Covet he compared with, so that might be just what you want; can't remember the numbers on NTSC and Adobe RGB coverage, but they're in this thread if you're determined enough to find them. You might also check the XPS 15 Owner's Lounge since those systems started deliveries weeks ago, whereas the M3800 just launched late last week. Speaking of which, you should consider an XPS 15 since none of the apps you mentioned would take advantage of the Quadro GPU, in which case the XPS 15 offers identical hardware at a lower price -- unless you've got some corporate deal that could land you an M3800 for less than an XPS.

Yes, Windows and third-party apps will continue to get better with HiDPI. It may take a while especially if it turns out that developers don't have the APIs or SDKs they need in Windows 8.1 to do this quite the way they want (which is what Adobe claims at the moment...), but it will happen.

 

How come the XPS 15 with the same configuration as M3800 have almost identical in price? Are they made from the same material?