Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

How big a difference is there between the M3800 and the M4800 ? I realize it is mainly GPU difference no ? I definately don't want to go to a 17 inch laptop i find it too big. Size and weight become quite important once you have to walk/ride 2-3 Km each day with the laptop in your backpack which is packed with more things depending on the day.... About battery life i would like it to be at least 4h with regular usage (wifi on )

 

GPU, port connectivity, and internal hardware expansion options. And optical drive (or at least a bay that can be used for that or I think an additional battery or additional hard drive).

 

No battery option for the optical drive bay, but there is a battery slice you can buy that connects on the bottom of the machine (uses the dock port), which doubles the battery life but of course adds extra weight. Battery on the M4800 might not be as bad as you think if you have a configuration that supports Optimus. Unfortunately this means you can't get the QHD+ screen. I think using Optimus, reducing the brightness a little, and not doing any CPU-intensive jobs would easily push you past 4 hours (without the battery slice).

Main issue for you would be size/weight of the machine and what you're willing to put up with.

 

CPU as well - the M3800 has the i7-3702HQ, while the M4800 has the higher TDP 4800QM or 4900QM.

Also a matte screen and number pad on the right side of the keyboard.

 

But should it be OK for QHD+? With HD I know that the K1100M is good enouph for me!

 

As always, it depends on what you're running at QHD+ resolution. The Intel chip in Optimus configuration runs typical Windows apps just fine at QHD+. 4K video should also be fine probably on Intel but if not, definitely on NVIDIA (don't have any good 4K video to test Intel). Playing recent games at decent quality settings on the other hand or doing intensive editing of 4K video probably wouldn't be feasible even for the NVIDIA GPU, or perhaps ANY current NVIDIA mobile GPU.

 

I need it for CAD (SolidWorks), Photoshop, Office, no games!

 

I can't speak from any experience, but I would expect it to be fine. You may run into some slowness with extremely large assemblies and a lot of parts set to transparent, but it shouldn't struggle in day to day use. The newer SW versions also have lightweight assembly mode, which should help.

If you ever run into issues, you could always try temporarily lowering the resolution to 1600 x 900, but I still think you'll be fine.

(I use SW almost daily and most of our work machines are fine with 1GB GPUs).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I'll let others chime in who use those apps on a more regular basis (and ideally have done so on this machine or the XPS 15), but even with your description there is of course a spectrum of how heavy the workload is and what you deem acceptable, e.g. working with raw images from an 8MP DSLR in Photoshop vs a multi-gigabyte image with several complex layers, and how long you're willing to wait for a given filter to be applied to either of those. The same I imagine would go for the complexity of your CAD models. A student or professional early in his/her career can often accept much lower performance than a highly-paid veteran in a very high-end company that charges clients a ton of cash and where therefore time is money and every last second of time saved on render work is likely worth the added cost to achieve that performance. Obviously this system isn't a bleeding-edge render machine, nor is it absolutely as fast as you can possibly get in a mobile form factor, but I would say that it's definitely a good cut above average performance and as such should meet the needs of most mobile professionals and exceed the "needs" of students.

Office is going to be no sweat no matter what, though.

 

At the moment I work with an Dell Precision M6400, Centrino2/2,53Ghz, Quadro FX3700M. This notebook will gradually slow but it is just about acceptable. If I buy something new, it should be already significantly faster
I need this notebook only for a next job!