Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Anybody tried the superspeed docking station?

 

Haven't seen it discussed yet in either thread and I've read both start to finish, but it's just a rebadged DisplayLink unit like many other similar products. This one is just DisplayLink's highest-end offering in terms of connectivity. Other threads seem to indicate people like it except for a couple people who had issues with the wired NIC (I'm betting driver, defective unit, or user error issue there) and some people being shocked and annoyed that a docking station that connects over USB doesn't charge the laptop. So if you want the closest thing to true docking station convenience, just remember to buy another AC adapter to keep with it and accept that you'll be connecting two cables to your laptop rather than one.

The only potential issues I can think of are:

- If you use video-intensive apps, the refresh rate through the dock might not be ideal.
- The maximum display resolution through the dock is lower than using the built-in display connectors.
- I haven't found information either way as to whether the dock's USB 3.0 ports support UASP like the machine's built-in ports.

All in all I think it's an appealing unit, but since I don't travel with my laptop much, $170 plus potentially the cost of another AC adapter was more than I was willing to spend to go from disconnecting and reconnecting six cables down to 2, especially if I had to keep direct-connecting my displays (for performance) and my external hard drive (for UASP), in which case I'd only be going from six down to five.

 

That makes a whole lot of sense indeed. Looking at my 17" right now, you can see both the track pad and keyboard had to shift to the left to include the number pad. It would only be too awkward to have the same thing done on a 15" laptop!!!!

On another note, I got a call today from Customer service to explain the reason for the delays. At least they called and did not want to just send an email... which is nice. My unit which I was supposed to receive today is also delayed until the 9th. From what she says, the main reason for the delay is a shortage of SSDs. If I wanted to get the smaller model it would be available right away practically. So the delay might not necessarily be with the screen as reported on the XPS thread.
But come to think of it, both smaller models in the XPS have HHDs, so it the mid tier is getting delays as well, that would mean that the problem is not just with the SSDs but also involves the screen type. If that is the case then the problem is even worse.
And from what she admitted, they cannot even give precise dates as of now for when that will be solved. She just said that it is a widespread problem and that they are working diligently to solve the situation.
So I think that there is a lot of stress going on at Dell right now and it is not only up to them because she could not even confirm 100% what was the source of the problem.

 

I've had the m3800 for a week now and i have to send it back. Mainly because of the HiDPI screen. It is not compatible Adobe Products. This is my experience (im a graphic designer):

1. The Font on the Keyboard is ridiculous. The font alone disqualifies the Laptop as a MBP rival. I dont get why they didnt used Arial or Helvetica, there is nothing wrong with those fonts. Or if they wanted to be special they could have developed an own Font. Instead they chose something like a font. The 'F' and 'E' are rounded (!) while the '4' is not. It is definitely a font chosen for its design. Its not better readible or something. I guess the machine was ready, then somebody said: "we have to do something with the font, it's just arial right now."

2. The Display at it's native resolution is not usable. I know Windows 8.1. has new scaling so i'll share what happened to me:
first use:
- dell m3800 (3200x1900px) and eizo Eizo SX2462WFS (1920x1200px)

200 % Laptop screen is very sharp (The color are horrible i spend some time to find that 'color enhancement' can be disabled in mobility center)
Photoshop CS6 on Laptop display is tiny (unusable) Photoshop UI on the Eizo Monitor is in normal Size but Menu, Mouse Pointer and OS elements are 200% bigger than expected

-unusable-

changed Windows 8 scaling option to per monitor scaling:

The Windows are scale at a breakpoint when moving from one Monitor to the other. This means: The 200% scaled Firefox windows is scaled to 100% on the External Monitor (yay) - but:

the tiny Photoshop Window gets - i wouldn't believe if it didn't happen to me - scaled down 50% on the external monitor so it is even smaller than on the laptop screen.


! to prevent Photoshop from being scaled down you have to find the Photoshop.exe right click it and under compatibility diable HiDPI scaling. ! Now you have the gigantic Menus again.

My workaround: First disable the Laptop Monitor adjust everything to the 1920x1200 resolution, choose the 8.1. Super scaling and then expand the Desktop to the Laptop screen. Now Photoshop will be in normal size on both Screens (If scaling is reenabled in compatibility settings, Scaled up based on 1920 res). Unfortunenately al the OS elemnts are tiny now (Menus, task bar, context menus etc.)
The thing that annoys me most: Photop is actually rendered in 1600x900 px and then scaled up.

-unusable-

I lowered the resolution to 1600x900px, image is blurry, so is 1920x1080. It's a subtle blur which causes massive headaches after 8 hours of usage.

Actually i was okay saying, i'll wait for HiDPI compatibility and stand the jokes about the keyboard, a MBP would be more expensive. It's the headache thing that i can't turn off so i'll send the machine back. I didn't want to buy i Mac because i own the CS Version for PC and you cant change the platform but that's no problem with the CC editions so i'll guess this is the end of me being a windows user.

If anyone at dell is reading this, please:

- Change the Font (seriously: everyone seeing this laptop made a joke about the font)
- give it a 'class a' screen with good color reproduction (this is meant for professional use)

I'm considering ordering the FHD Version but: there's this font and i dont know how good the screen is.

i added pictures of the tiny photoshop interface and the scaled illustrator interface. I'd love to see someone from Microsoft using Photoshop at native resolution and the Touch Screen.

 

Agreed that Adobe products can be difficult to unusable on the QHD+ panel, but that's hardly Dell's fault. It's Adobe's and (according to Adobe at least) partly Microsoft's. I agree the keyboard font is a little odd and looks more like an Alienware font than a business font, but honestly who cares? Your hands are covering the keyboard most of the time anyway. I guess I say that as a touch typist who never even looks at the keyboard (in fact my main keyboard is a Das Keyboard Ultimate, which has completely blank keys), but even if you're a hunt and peck typist, a keyboard font is an irritation at most, not a real problem in my mind.

And I'm no graphic designer, but two people with professional calibrators have found that the built-in panel's color gamut and accuracy are both outstanding out of the box -- once you disable "Splendid mode". So I'd say Dell did ship a Grade A panel; they just configured it with a default setting that would only appeal to people who buy TVs at retail stores based on how bright the colors are and don't care about accuracy. But change that setting and you're good.

Also, 1600x900 should absolutely NOT be blurry because it's a perfect 1:2 scale factor pixel mapping onto the panel's 3200x1800 resolution. If you're seeing blur something is wrong with your settings. My guess is you changed scale factor and resolution at the same time and then didn't log off and back on so the scaling change could take full effect before you passed judgment on blur. Set it to 1600x900, disable scaling, log off and back on, and the image should be perfect.

Still, I agree that if you need to use Adobe products on the internal panel, that alone would be sufficient reason to return it since you'd have to forego the HiDPI benefit in the first place, and especially since Adobe doesn't even have an ETA for HiDPI updates to their apps. Sorry you've had a bad experience!

 

OMG so mega, super, ultra frustrated with Dell. Got my M3800 Today, and have to say I am Amazed! Amazed that a company can even EXIST as incompetent as Dell. They sent me the WRONG computer. So Get this... My first hint something was off, was that my system was supposed to arrive on Dec 20th, and after reading all the delays here, I was amazed it arrived Today! So. ok, Dell is awesome, they shipped it early. Ok. So then i fire it up and Surprised to see Windows 8.1! I specifically ordered Win 7. Ok, well everyone makes errors, I can roll with win 8, I'll give it a shot and "downgrade" to win 7 if needed. So I go into the specs, and I have a GT750M! Im like.. huh?! Then i look closer, and it has an xps15 sticker on it. OK.. so im pissed. I call DELL, get a rep who cant find my order even with purchase ID, and Order number. He then proceeds to put me on hold for literately 27 minutes with NO check in, no update. Then bam.. I'm hung up on. Ha haha, I work in customer service, this is MADNESS. I go to call back... Oh guess what, they are closed, how convenient. Oh.. there is also no Chat option for order support and returns. That's cool, I only just spent close to $3000 dollars on this. So i chat with just normal customer service on the main page, and naturally they are completely inept. IF you want a laugh, let me know and i will post the chat transcript. Bottom line , is they say they sent out the correct machine but UPS somehow mixed it up and sent me a xps15 that was almost exactly the same machine, but different Internal components. Seriously. So im stuck, waiting till tomorrow to be put on hold again, and try to FIND where they screwed up. I have never owned an Apple machine. I have 7 Dell's. The moment I get a refund, heading to Apple store to pick up my rMBP. I'm seriously worried that they will say I have concocted an elaborate plan to somehow get a brand new xps and Somehow Lex Luthur it to swap them to return a different machine. If ANY DELL REPS read this board, I would Love to hear a retort.

 

Thanks for the detailed review. One more confirmation of the madness of the HiDPI screen. I hope someone can post a comparison between the QHD and the FHD screens soon. If the FHD screen is close in color reproduction and viewing angles, I may bite; otherwise, I have no interest in dealing with the kind of headaches you describe, for no tangible benefit of any kind. Like I said, for me there's no point in getting a QHD screen.

As an aside, the more general issue exemplified by this machine is a problem that ails the PC industry in general: These guys are flat-out incapable of producing products that consumers really want. Not to beat that dead horse too much, but they refuse to sell us 16x10 screens anymore, with the patently ludicrous excuse that those would be too expensive, yet now they insist on pushing useless touchscreens on everybody, cost be damned, to which Dell has now added that useless QHD option on top. And these guys wonder why their sales are tanking. Is anybody in this industry still interested in finding out what customers really want? Mind you, I include Microsoft in this, who, rather than fixing the decades-old scaling issues Windows has always had, decided they'd muck up the User Interface instead, again in an attempt to sell people stuff that nobody has asked for. Sheesh...

So, yeah, I'm not surprised that you may be just one more customer leaving the Windows/PC ecosystem. Too bad, really, but it's a rational choice at this point.

 

Some of us are REALLY psyched on the high-DPI options. My life is spent staring at text (code, documents); rMBP screens are much nicer for that than conventional FHD (or HD+, as most of the 14" screens I've had have) and the remaining app-scaling issues are worth it for the 7-10 hours a day I'm looking at text.

Given the cost of a high-end IPS FHD screen on the Lenovos and older Dell Precision models that offer it, the IGZO QHD+ screen is also a WHOLE lot cheaper.

While Windows 8/8.1 doesn't help (and I'm thinking the odds are about 50/50 of downgrading back to Win 7 on the machine I've got on order), I think that it's less a matter of the industry not making what people want as the fact that hardware has gotten way ahead of what people (or software needs).

Except for some early netbooks, a 5 year machine is generally good enough for most people these days, and some 7 year old machines are still good enough to run Windows 7 if the memory has been upgraded.

5 years ago, a 5-year old machine (10 years old now) was an absolutely awful Pentium 4, or an even slower (if less overheating-prone) Pentium III.

A 7-year old machine then (12 years old now) was a Pentium II or Pentium III (or maybe one of the last-gasp Pentium MMX) machines, and probably won't have even done a very good job running the then-brand-new Windows XP... I know I was still running 98SE as XP was not happy with only 128MB of RAM.

For a power user, there's a substantial difference between a Sandy Bridge machine and Ivy Bridge/Haswell. For a lot of users, basically any machine new enough to have two cores is fungible.

For a great many of those average users, the new machines they're looking at are actually SLOWER than the last generation, as they're fast enough anyway, and the price and battery life are better on the ULV/Ultrabook processors (instead of being a relatively exotic and more expensive part for road-warrior ultralight machines as they were in the past.)

--

Should anyone care, I'll report back on how JetBrains IntelliJ does with the high DPI whenever my machine arrives (just went to "in production" today.)

 

This is a very thoughtful (and very true) post! I was using a Precision M6300 that was over 5 years old until just now; I added an SSD to it almost 4 years ago, and I'm certain that's what singlehandedly kept me happy with its performance. The SSD gave it a whole new lease on life, and honestly I probably would have kept using it rather than buying an XPS 15 had I not had an opportunity to help someone else by giving them my M6300. The Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM in that system were (and continue to be) more than adequate for many, many-tabbed Web browsing and even some light Creative Suite work. But as you said, keeping my previous system for this long (an Inspiron 9100) would have been unthinkable.

We do indeed seem to have plateaued on our needs compared to what PCs can provide in hardware now. I think part of it is that people are doing more and more on smartphones and tablets, so the capabilities of mainstream PCs are just significantly outstripping demand in all but a few niche markets like design, engineering, and gaming. But although those are important segments, they're not the majority of the population.

But of course the industry needs to keep selling PCs, so they're trying whatever they can to make us feel obsoleted and get the upgrade itch. And they're having trouble, evidenced by the fact that today a model in a given segment is significantly cheaper than its equivalent was a few years back, even BEFORE adjusting for inflation. My Precision M6300 cost $5250 retail when I bought it all those years ago; today's equivalent Precision M6800 costs about half that.

The TV industry is facing the same problem right now. Everybody has an HDTV now, the quality peaked a long time ago with the legendary Pioneer Kuro (which I'm lucky enough to own), and only now years later has anyone else finally matched that benchmark (Panasonic with the ZT60 series), and TVs are already as large as anyone can reasonably fit into a living room. So the industry tried to get everyone to upgrade again with 3D TV, but that's so far been a bust. Now they're all panicking and desperately hoping we'll spring for 4K. In the meantime, HDTVs, just like PCs, are selling for rock-bottom prices in an attempt to keep some amount of sales volume flowing.

In terms of your system, mine was in production for just over a week, fwiw. And give Win8.1 a fair shake. I tried Win8.0 twice and gave up within an hour both times, but 8.1 is somehow different; the changes are subtle, but they seem to have made all the difference. The 2-minute Metro interface tutorial that's new for 8.1 would have saved Win8.0 from most of the negative press and user frustration all by itself had it existed then. I'm still irritated by a couple things, like a lot of functionality having been removed from Network and Sharing Center, but there's nothing that makes me want to go back to 7.

 

The estimated delivery date of my M3800 is now changed to 1/9/2014. I ordered the model with QHD+ and 512 SSD in a few hours after it was lunched on 11/14/2013 in the US. Very frustrating. I don't know if I should cancel my order and re-order a few months later as I am reading some issues about M3800 in this forum. Could someone help me on this?