Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

What are you all getting for warranty coverage, drop coverage, etc.? What's worth it to what point? Just curious. I usually never get extended warranties, but this machine is getting expensive to replace.

 

Statistically the most common periods of laptop issues are the first 90 days and the second year -- so I'd get at least 2 years. I got 3 just because as you say, this is an expensive machine to replace, and I also expect to keep it for longer. However, I know lots of businesses like to keep their machines covered for as long as they'll be using them because the cost of downtime incurred while waiting for replacement parts purchased from Dell and sent with regular shipping isn't worth the savings on warranty costs compared to the convenience of next-day warranty replacement service.

I don't get accidental damage coverage because my laptop stays on my desk most of the time and I'm always careful not to drop it or spill anything on it.

 

The think is that i can get

4th Generation Intel Core i7-4702HQ Processor (6M Cache, up to 3.20 GHz)
Windows 8.1 Pro (64Bit) English
Microsoft® Office 2013 Trial
McAfee Security Center 30 day trial, Digital Delivery
16GB (2x8GB) 1600MHz DDR3
256GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
Dell 61 WHr 6-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery
Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 + Bluetooth 4.0
15.6 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and QHD+ resolution (3200 x 1880)
Internal UK/Irish Qwerty Backlit Keyboard

with
3Yr Basic Warranty - Next Business Day for 1353

or

4th Generation Intel Core i7-4702HQ Processor (6M Cache, up to 3.20 GHz)
Windows 8.1 Pro (64Bit) English
Microsoft® Office 2013 Trial
McAfee Security Center 30 day trial, Digital Delivery
130W AC Adapter
16GB (2x8GB) 1600MHz DDR3
1TB 5400rpm SATA 2.5 inch ATA Internal Hard Drive or 500GB Hydrid with 8 GB flash (which with 16 GBs of memory does not worth it)
Dell 61 WHr 6-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery
Not Selected in this Configuration
Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 + Bluetooth 4.0
15.6 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and QHD+ resolution (3200 x 1880)
Internal UK/Irish Qwerty Backlit Keyboard
Keyboard palmrest, 81 key
Not required

with 3Yr Basic Warranty - Next Business Day for 1262

At the same time I can get xps 15 with the same stuff as the last model ( just with nVIDIA 750 ofc) for 1207 although i am not sure if this includes the 3 years guarantee.

I am really getting stretched on my budget to get that, and I do not know if 100 pounds extra worth, plus it and I have no idea which SSD they put in. I mean it comes down to what i mentioned previously, this technology is not so mature to make actually not huge difference between different labels. If you can reassure me that it is a good SSD I ll think about it.

If I can get the xps 15 for that price(1207 or eve 1250) and 3 year guarantee I ll go for it since it has 750m, I don't need quadroo i just want to play a few games now and then and I believe that the 750 m is slightly better in that area although i am not sure though about it.

Anyway apart from the fact that i found m3800 just as a rdy deal like that is the reason i am looking at it as XPS 15 would have been my first choice seeing that they are the same apart from the card + some other stuff???

 

Hi,
Are your order still on track?
Mine from 16th. November is since this morning showing "shipping". I don't know how long time shipping will take to Denmark, but not too long I hope.

 

First off, that 8GB of flash would be used as a cache for the regular hard drive; the 16GB of RAM has no relationship to whether that's worthwhile at all since they're serving completely different and independent functions. That cache plus the cache built into the 500GB hybrid hard drive basically gives you quasi-SSD performance if the data you're accessing happens to already be in the cache, but neither one is like having a real SSD because most of your data won't be on that cache, and low-capacity flash memory intended for caching also tends to be much slower than true SSDs.

The 256GB SSD that Dell is using appears to be a Lite-On unit. Bokeh mentioned in Post #224 of this thread that it benchmarks at 480 MB/s read. That's not the fastest thing out there but it's still very fast; regular hard drives probably bench around 70-80 MB/s read, so you can do the math on the performance factor increase. The 512GB unit is the Samsung SM841, which pretty much IS the fastest thing out there. Alternatively you could just buy the version with a 500GB drive and buy an mSATA SSD of your choosing separately, though you'd have to do some work to wipe and reinstall Windows, of course. Either way, I would definitely think about an SSD. Like I said, fast computers by today's standards feel slow when they've got normal hard drives compared to old computers that have been upgraded with SSDs. To give a point of comparison, on my M6300 with the original 160GB 7200 RPM drive, Windows loaded in 38 seconds. I took an image of that setup and cloned it to my SSD when I got it (as opposed to doing a fresh install), and the SSD loaded Windows in 13 seconds. That's an enormous difference, and it pays dividends the entire time you're using your computer -- Photoshop CS6 loads in about 6 seconds rather than 20. And keep in mind that while my SSD (the Samsung PM800) is still fast by today's spinning hard drive standards, it's very slow by current SSD standards because it's now over 3 years old. It benches somewhere around 250 MB/s read, barely over half what the Lite-On unit would pull.

The XPS 15 and M3800 are identical except for GPU, (sometimes) whether you get 8.1 Core or 8.1 Pro, (sometimes) Premium Support vs ProSupport, and (sometimes) whether you get the AC dongle and USB to Ethernet adapter standard or as optional added-cost accessories. If your workload won't take advantage of the Quadro GPU's added features over the GeForce line, then get whichever model is cheaper for you.

 

I posted updated speeds on the first page. Benchmarks are a little over 500 MB/s for the Lite-On. The "Last BIOS time" listed in the W8.1 startup menu is 3.6 seconds on the M3800. Total boot time is 11 seconds.

 

A couple hundred pounds over the life of a machine that you will probably own and use for at least 3 years is miniscule when you think about it. When you think that SSDs in a couple years may cost half what they do now, half of the difference is even more inconsequential.

Is 200 pounds in your pocket for the next 2 years worth all the time that you would waste waiting for your computer to load software and files?

Spring for the SSD, even with their current speeds, bulk storage is still one of the, if not the primary bottleneck to computer speed today. By multiplying the speed that your computer can access data by as much as 5 times, you are going to significantly improve your experience and be more productive. I don't know what you value your time at, it doesn't take much to justify $100-200 over the course of a couple years.

 

Just went back to look at the battery configurations and the site is showing 9-cell, 91Whr as the default for the higher spec config ($2499). Looks like it is a 9-cell and that it was a page error earlier?

 

Are you recommending going with one 500gb ssd for both storage and boot, as a slow storage drive is also a bottleneck? Or would/could you go with the 256 ssd for boot and programs and the 500gb hybrid for storage? I was thinking of doing the second, but I don't have ssd experience. I was going to store programs on the 256 ssd and Autocad files on the spinning drive. Will I regret that?

 

Either one would work well, although I'd consider putting AutoCAD files on the SSD because if they're large, you'll experience significant performance gains loading and saving them if they reside on an SSD -- or at least AutoCAD files for the projects you're actively working on, with the full collection on slower storage if you won't use them often. But if for example you have large music/photo/video collections (and you're just using them casually as opposed to being a sound designer, a professional photographer making complex edits on high-res photos, or a video editor) then that data could definitely reside on slow storage.