Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

That does seem strange and I can certainly understand your frustration. Mine was ordered on the 18th November, Shipped on the 24th November and arrived on 4th December. I am based in the UK and ordered through my Dell account manager.

 

Firefox and Thunderbird look great. I haven't tried office but i guess they look great too. So if your using a 16gb "Workstation-class" Laptop for light office purposes this is a great opportunity to spend money. You have to get a 4k external monitor and throw your current away.

 

I have just completed a wireless test on my M3800 - straight form the factory with no driver modification. Runs perfectly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQTf-GmBlUg

 

Probably you're right that power adapter is feeding DC to motherboard, but that doesn't mean the current going through coil is DC.

From an electrical field of view, there's no point using a coil where the current going through it is DC. The point of coil, which is an inductor, is to form resonance (with capacitor) or filter out the AC component in a current.

From practical point of view, it is common knowledge that AC signal can be produced while the input is pure DC. Or how do you think the high-freq clock is generated?

As to the source of whine, I'm not that sure. Probably it's a harmonic in low-freq(compared to RF). If this low-freq harmonic is beyond human's hearing limit, then probably it's not audible to that person. Basically, I think, besides the noise, this is not going to affect the performance, If some machine has the whine while some hasn't, note that this should be tested in the same circumstance, such as heard by the same person, then it probably is the difference in the filter that is used to filter the harmonic.

 

Hi guys i just received my low-specc m3800 today. Unfortunately it only featured a 500gb hybrid, and not the 32gb msata + 500gb hybrid like i thought. The sheets on dells webpages just seem to differ from country to country (i'm in norway). I'm therefore looking at getting a mSata card to install windows + apps on, and use the 500gb hybrid as storage. Would this be easy to do on my own?

The screen (FHD) is actually fantastic once you remove the 125% scaling that win8.1 has chosen as default, viewing angle is close to 180% (I can watch it directly from the side with no problem at all), colour seem fine, and it is sharp and respoding to touch as wanted.
However i feel that the touchpad is acting a bit weird at times, and tried installing the synaptics driver posted in here, but i get an error whilst installing (Installing Failed).

I don't see the need for the QHD+ screen, as the FHD one is fantastic. The machine is quiet, like REALLY quiet and feels of serious build quality.
Something else that annoys me a bit is the buttons to turn up / down volume etc on the F-keys are default to their media mode, is there a way to set F-keys as default, and use FN + said F-key to change volume. This is problematic as i actually use F-key shortcuts quite alot.

 

Just a quick question because I dont think its explicitly clear...for anyone who has ordered the mid range...256gb SSD +500 HDD setup...is the keyboard backlit? sorry if this is a silly question but its not explicitly clear...my order just says "US keyboard". Im assuming all the configurations have backlit keyboards but I cant say for certain. Thanks.

 

You can change the default behavior of the F keys in the BIOS, or in the Mobility Center if you have QuickSet installed. Plus there's also that F-Lock icon on the Esc button.

Yes you can install an mSATA card (I recommend the Crucial M500 or Samsung PM841) and install Windows onto it. I highly recommend it. Just make sure your BIOS is set to AHCI for its SATA mode, not Intel Smart Response, since the latter would set up your mSATA unit to be a cache for the spinning hard drive.

For the touchpad, a newer version of the Synaptics driver broke compatibility with this system's touchpad. If you can find version 16.3.15.1 somewhere, that's what you want.

They're all backlit.

 

While I concede that Windows and the apps that run on it aren't ready for HiDPI nearly as much as Apple's ecosystem is, I disagree that it serves no useful purpose other than bragging rights. Photo or video editing would be dramatically enhanced by the extra resolution (you could have a pixel-perfect Full HD clip in one corner with room for your editing tools on the rest of the display), and frankly high-resolution graphics and text look awesome, and the iPhone 4 and the birth of the Retina display proved that people like things that simply look awesome. By your logic we could argue that Blu-ray serves no useful purpose because the video and sound of DVD is adequate. DVD is indeed "adequate", but Blu-ray is better -- and some people will pay for better because it gives them a more enjoyable experience. Others won't, and that's fine too.

I would say that if you're the type that wants everything to "just work", then you probably should stick to FHD. But that shouldn't be news to anyone; people who want everything to "just work" typically don't belong on the cutting edge with the early adopters, who will accept some teething pains in exchange for the benefits. Blu-ray had its share of teething pains too, for that matter: constant firmware updates due to constant bugs, different level Profiles and support for bitstreaming or not, the existence of HD-DVD early on, etc. You just have to decide how much complexity and possible glitches you're able/willing to accept given the benefit, keeping in mind that the complexity will go down over time.

And like I've said before, I expect that Windows and its apps will become much better about HiDPI long before I'm thinking of getting a new laptop, so I'd rather take QHD+ now so I've got it when everything is ready (and still enjoy it for the most part now) than be stuck with 1080p when everything else is ready to take advantage of HiDPI.

 

Unless you want to edit in HD or high res images....

The world is moving to hi dpi pretty quickly especially in graphic arts. Phones, tablets and apple devices are all there and not going back. 4k displays will probably be the norm in studios once the prices come down. Adobe's issues with Photoshop are well known and are being worked on although they point the finger at microsoft, which seems thin considering other apps of theirs work just fine.

As for display colors, saturation etc, I would hope anyone serious about such things are using a hardware calibrator to adjust it. We do this even on our high end displays.

 

Short hands-on review done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezykRShEbMI Sorry it is a bit dark.