Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

The best place to look at the moment is the XPS15 owners' thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/735403-xps-15-haswell-owners-lounge.html

 

Hmm, the M3800s at least in the US all ship with Win7 and just include a Win8 upgrade. Is that not what you're seeing?

In any case, yes you can boot from mSATA. If your system shipped with the 32GB mSATA cache drive though, you'd first need to flip the SATA mode in the BIOS from RAID or Intel Smart Response or whatever to AHCI instead if it wasn't already. That change will almost certainly render your existing Windows environment unusable and probably make the data on the spinning drive inaccessible, so plan to set the system up from scratch again at that point if you have to make that change, but once you do you'll be able to have the setup you want.

If the spec you buy comes with a 256GB mSATA rather than the 32GB cache, you can skip the BIOS step and do a clean install the same as you would on any other machine.

Not sure what you have in mind that would be more definitive. A professional review? Just because that person didn't have Wifi issues wouldn't mean no one else would. Crowdsourced reviews as found here in the XPS 15 Haswell Owner's Lounge would be much more helpful in that regard, and the overwhelming response has been that Wifi issues (which seem to only certain routers/firmware in the first place) are resolved with the new 16.6 driver. I've only seen one person thus far say that his Wifi issues weren't fixed that way (though his issues were more severe than everyone else's to begin with), and Dell is coming to replace his Wifi card as a result.

mSATA in that setup isn't really a second drive; it's used as a cache. Actually if it's really only 8GB rather than the 32 we're seeing here, it's probably exclusively the hibernation partition for Intel Rapid Start. But you can tweak a BIOS setting to make mSATA available as a regular SATA port if you want to install a larger SSD there. Look at one of my posts a few above this one.

 

Thanks for the info. So... kind of dumb question, but how do you know that certain apps (Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema 4D) wont take advantage of the Quadro? Is there something i can check in certain apps to see that for myself? I mean, Dell was hyping M3800 for designers, Multi media artists etc... so with really the only Discernible difference from the xps15 and 3800 being the GPU, can/does that make THAT much of a difference? Also.. any other opinions or takes would be welcome. Thanks

 

@spenser you might find this interesting
www.adobe.com/go/dv_hw_performance/

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Sorry, the previous link was from 2012, here is the most recent version
http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adob.../cc/pdfs/Configuring_Your_System_20131016.pdf

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It's not that they won't take advantage of the Quadro; they'll use GPU acceleration with a Quadro, and you can even find "Quadro certified drivers for Adobe apps" (though they're way outdated), but GPU acceleration also works with a GeForce card. The Quadro-specific enhancements have to do with applications like modeling and rendering, so think AutoCAD, Maya, and apparently apps that handle scientific analysis. The easiest way to check for yourself whether your apps will use actual Quadro extensions is to look at the specs of the app; no point in buying it first only to find out that it's not being used. But be careful differentiating between GPU acceleration and actual Quadro extensions. For example, NVIDIA's Quadro page mentions several Adobe apps, but if you read the text it just talks about how well they run due to GPU acceleration. That works on the GeForce side too, but NVIDIA's page for those GPUs is of course focused on how awesome games are.

 

Wow thats insanly helpfull. thanks man (or possible woman)

 

Cool thanks, So Cinema 4D is a 3d modeling, animation package, so possible it may benifit. But.. without doing a ton of research, would it be safe to say that having the quado wouldnt be a bad thing? I mean.. It can essentially help, but its not really going to be a detriment to apps that dont fully utilize it? thanks for info again.

 

It certainly won't hurt. There's speculation that the GeForce card might be clocked higher than the Quadro based on generic specs that were pulled (without an indicated source), but we've only got actual speeds from either an M3800 or XPS 15, not both; sorry, I can't remember which at this point since I've been following both threads and since they pertain to identical systems, it's hard to remember which posts are where. But even if that discrepancy exists, I doubt you'd notice that much if at all on applications, so if you're ok paying a (likely) higher price for the M3800 even though you might not get any benefit from it except not having to devote some time to research, go for it.

 

Guys I have the option to buy the system an build my own. At the hard disk drives it gives me the option to select

1)256GB 2.5inch Serial ATA Solid State Drive
2)256GB SATA SED Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
3)256GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card

What is the difference beteen them?

Thank you

 

1)256GB 2.5inch Serial ATA Solid State Drive
2.5" standard laptop form factor SSD. If you get this, you will be limited to the 61Wh battery.
2)256GB SATA SED Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
These two are mSATA SSD's. This one has built in encryption.
3)256GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
This one is standard mSATA SSD with no encryption.