Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

My M3800 unit will be arriving soon, is your touchpad a m3800 unit as well? And is this { Drivers | Synaptics } the proper website for the drivers you refer too? (just want to have my resources available for when my laptop comes in.)

Thanks.

 

I have the XPS 15, but the touchpad is identical. And yes those are the drivers I'm using. Good luck with yours!

 

You also lose the quad core CPU on the base XPS 15. I haven't seen any Dell or Lenovo in the business lines with quad core + iGPU, even non-workstation models.

My use (paid for out of my pocket, although via my corporate discount) is separate from what my employer is going to be buying dozens of for developers.

For my personal use, doing both work AND gaming, the GPU matters.

For most of our developers with business-owned machines, GPU might make it a fun machine to bring home, but saving the money, batter life, and heat would all be pluses and there's no business case for the GPU beyond keeping a subset of developers happy with non-work use.

 

My order is still stuck in pre-production with a delivery date of the 29th of this month. Would I assume that I will need to reorder the laptop?

 

Have the first group of customers who ordered on the release day received your M3800? There are so many problems with XPS 15 and M3800 is generally considered as a counterpart of XPS 15, although somewhere earlier in this thread, a quote from Dell online chat mentions that M3800 have a better build quality, different motherboard and of course different GPU.
I just hope to see some feedback from enough number of customers based on real experience. For now, I'm wondering between XPS 15 mid model and M3800 mid model. I kind of prefer the M3800 with 1920*1080 because 3200*1800 seems to bring little user experience with human eye (correct me if I'm wrong) but a lot more problems with win 7, scaling and multi-display.

 

If the order has been acknowledged and confirmed, you should receive it eventually, and cancelling and re-ordering will generally get it later. In my experience (more servers than laptops, I grant) we've seen quite a few times where the web site has missed changes in status and it's shown pre-production even after they've emailed out a ship notice.

Calling should get you more up-to-date information. Annoying, but that's Dell for you.

 

The only motherboard difference would be the different GPU chip soldered onto it. Otherwise they're identical. That Dell rep conversation was typical marketing-speak from reps who often don't know what they're talking about, especially with new products. That rep just regurgitated the marketing pitch for the Precision line and the marketing pitch for XPS.

 

There may be other components that are different in order to support the different GPU, but I wouldn't expect them to use electrical components with tighter tolerances or anything like that. I'm sure these motherboards are made on the same line as the XPS 15 motherboards.

 

Actually if the history of GeForce vs Quadro GPUs is any indication, chances are the GPU is virtually identical on a hardware level as well. Historically the only hardware differences have been certain solder points being severed or not, which tells the GPU whether to enable the extra Quadro features and was how some GeForce owners converted their cards to the equivalent Quadro unit. Back in the day Intel and AMD used this same technique to determine whether their CPUs were multiplier-unlocked, and the required electrical current between those solder points was weak enough that you could literally take a #2 pencil to fill in the gap between them on a multipler-locked CPU and presto, that graphite just unlocked your multiplier. I did that myself on an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz chip way back when.

But back to the issue at hand, of course the BIOS image in the GPU will be different as well (which among other things explains the different clock speeds), but in this case it appears that even the quantity and type of RAM is identical as well. I doubt Dell had to make any changes at all to the motherboard, except again a different BIOS flash so that it identifies as a Precision rather than an XPS.

 

Regarding the question about delivery times I just wanted to mention that it took 8 days from ordering our units until we got the UPS shipping codes today. With a bit of luck we will have our units by end of this week.