M4800 Owner's Thread

The m4800 was sold with a heavy compact coil 180w charger from delta, shortly after dell started using mosfet slim chargers from delta, flextronics and lite-on all using 7,4mm plug with blue or white led light.
These weigh considerable less but are also not as good as a good old solid coil adaptor.
I have several flextronics and the fuse is triggered randomly, I have one of the lite-on which is the better and delta is the to go brand.
These slim chargers also emit radio frequencies which has to be filtered out with even more components creating a whole chain of components on the pcb...all that just to avoid a coiled transformer to save some weight and space.

180w is minimum for any 4 core cpu otherwise EC will throttle performance, now the m4800 was sold all the way with 4940mx in rare cases all the way down to i3 cpu's, so it might explain why the system will be fine with different power supplies.
You can check in bios under battery, it will tell you what power adapter is plugged in and what wattage, mine says 240W.

 

So, for a considerable amount of time, I've been testing several video editors on my upgraded M4800. Although I still have the trouble of playing 10-bit videos and not even turning off SG helped with VLC. The other video player I tested was fine though. Used MPC-BE x64 to play them.

I tested out the following software for video editing:

• DaVinci Resolve 16 and 17 Free - VRAM has already been taken up by 50%, can become sluggish
• Magix Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 18 - VRAM usage is pretty efficient, plenty to spare
• Magix Vegas Pro 18 - same as above in theory, but with the benefit of 10-bit video editing
• EDIUS Pro 9 and X - Behaves almost similarly to Vegas.

It's a really nice system to edit on, and even if you get the WX4150 with 2GB Video memory you won't lose much if you use the right software for the job (but I'd still recommend a 4GB whenever you can.) And I think it's actually much MUCH better than my Asus gaming laptop from 2016, which has a 970M and a 6th gen i7 in it, that struggled considerably.

However I still have a slight issue where the CPU hovers at 50c idle unless the fan kicks in. I haven't figured out how to resolve that.

 

I bought some i7 stickers to replace the i5 one on the palmrest. They seem to be legitimate, and they weren't expensive either. But I'm still waiting for the official adapter. Because I don't know if it's necessarily related but considering how heavy it really is and testing a benchmark on the M4800 for Affinity Photo, my scores aren't so good. XTU was telling me there was Power Limit Throttling during the benchmark. And I think it's the result of the adapter that came with the system not really capable, even if the system says it's 180W it could be fooled.

 

I had a lot of issues with speedstep activated and got some situations that clocks won't even surpass 1.7 GHz running on battery (and 2.4 GHz connected to power). If it's activated for you, try to turn it off and see if it does make a difference. It's an option in bios.

 

I think it's not because of SpeedStep or TurboBoost, it's not thermally throttling so it's not that, so... I wonder if it's the VRM of the CPU. I may have to change the pads.

 

Mine was also not thermally throttling, but it was reducing clock speeds either way. I didn't see this behavior on M6700, so yeah, it was weird, but turning it off made possible to reach maximum clock speeds.

 

Welp, the one I have bought is Flextronics... How does it get triggered randomly?

 

Don't know, at random times the autofuse triggers cutting the power, you'll know because the led on the plug is out and the laptop doesn't charge, removing the power cord and re-inserting it resets the fuse and it will have power again.
The charger I have in the kitchen was off yesterday but it had not been used in a while, I have no idea what makes my flextronics shutting off on me.
I have bad experience with flextronics because there is or was a local manufacture plant nearby and everything coming from them had to be sent back or fixed by us because the products had been assembled incorrectly. The locally produced we could send back what came from china we fixed otherwise we had to wait like five months for the pallet to be sent back to china stopping production.

I ended up with two of them, after that I made sure to ask seller if the images are not easy to zoom into to make sure I get an Delta or Lite-on

 

Ah fair enough. Mine's appeared to be stable after testing with the Affinity Photo benchmark and messing in Vegas Pro. Never tripped.

 

So this panel I've installed: N156HHE-GA1, is also used in some MSI laptops and with the feature True Color, it gives you 100% sRGB color coverage. But I'm not entirely sure on this. Makes me wonder if this is now an unfeasible thing to do since Notebookcheck praised this panel, only to explain they achieve this by using the utility then calibration... This is gonna be difficult to reproduce the 100% unless of course its apparent when the picture is entirely different looking, but it looks bluish and greenish.

Not sure how to make it look any warmer than it currently is, but it might be the nature of TN vs IPS. Knowing that the gamut almost covers DCI P3 is nice, even AdobeRGB but maybe I just need a calibration device for myself...