Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Must be a mistake, mine has no status lights apart from the battery and power button as you say.

Mine came with Windows 7 and an OS disc as per my request, no Windows 8 to be seen anywhere, the Windows 7 drivers are on the Dell support site, I reinstalled windows from an external dvd drive after putting in an mSata.I removed the hard drive before installing OS to mSata as I did after having trouble doing the same on the M4600 but I'm not sure it's actually necessary to do so as the bios may be a bit cleverer this time around.No problems all the same

 

What's the difference between the solid state hybrid drive on the 1920x1080 precision and the solid state drive full mini card??

 

Full mini card refers probably to msata ssd.

 

The hybrid drive is a 500GB hard drive with rotating platters, with an added amount of flash on board to speed it up. If they use Seagate (likely) it's one of these ST500LM000 • Laptop Thin SSHD 500GB Hard Drive with 8GB of flash.

There are 256gb and 512gb 2.5" SSD options available via premier or if you call sales. I don't think anyone on the thread has ordered one, and it's not clear who makes the drives (although it might be infer-able from the firmware on the download page.)

The "solid state drive full mini card" is, as vayu64 already said, an mSATA ssd -- the "full" refers to the length of the mSATA card (it could also be "half" length, like is often used for network cards.) If 256GB, it appears to usually be a LiteOn/Plextor with Marvell controller; if 512GB, it appears to usually be Samsung.

In case it's helpful, here are the drive configuration options from Premier (prices removed, sorry, lest they identify my employer):
Storage and Media Options
Hard Drive
* 500GB 2.5” Solid State Hybrid Drive Selected
* 1TB 2.5 Serial ATA (5400RPM) Hard Drive
* 128GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
* 256GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
* 256GB 2.5inch Serial ATA Solid State Drive
* 256GB Solid State Mini-card Drive, Encrypted (Opal 2)
* 512GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
* 512GB 2.5inch Serial ATA Solid State Drive
* DELLPLUS NO


Other options
Additional Hard Drive
* No Additional Hard Drive Selected
* 500GB 2.5 Solid State Hybrid Drive
* 1TB 2.5 Serial ATA (5400RPM) Hard Drive
* 256GB 2.5inch Serial ATA Solid State Drive
* 512GB 2.5inch Serial ATA Solid State Drive

Currently showing 1/15 estimated ship date for the FHD screens, and 1/28 for the QHD+. Gah.

 

Would it be better to buy the lowest spec model and install the ssd and ram yourself?

 

The lowest spec model doesn't have QHD+ display, only FHD. If that's what you need, then yes, it would be cheaper to upgrade it yourself.

The self-installed parts would not be covered by Dell's on-site warranty of course. And you will have the hassle of installing the parts and re-installing the OS. So, it all depends on your definition of "better".

 

Hi - I've been looking for a thin and light notebook to act as the driving pc for a three display trading station when I'm in my home office and with good enough battery life to take with me when I'm travelling. The M3800 fits the bill and I like the top spec model. Since I have no experience with workstation notebooks or graphics cards (Quadro, Firepro etc) just wondering if its easy to use the miniDP and HDMI ports to hook up 3 external display's (all three will be 1080p LED monitors)?

P.S. Anyone with the top spec model (91whr batt. 16GB Ram, 512gb msata ssd with QHD+ screen) have the exact weight in hand for their machine? Dell site says 4.15 lbs - Thanks in advance

 

FYI for your intended purposes you'd be just as well served with the XPS 15, which is identical in its top spec except for using a GeForce rather than Quadro GPU, but that won't matter for your content -- in fact with trading displays either system would probably only ever use the Intel GPU and never switch over to the dedicated GPU. And having a workstation graphics card won't actually affect your external display prospects either since on this system even when the dedicated GPU is engaged, it passes display data to the Intel chip for actual output.

To use 3 external displays, you'll need either DisplayPort displays that support daisy-chaining natively or a DisplayPort MST hub. You could also use USB graphics adapters like DisplayLink, but those don't work as well -- then again they would likely be fine for trading station displays.

According to the DisplayPort 1.2 spec, that single port should be able to handle any of the following configs, though to my knowledge no one here or on the XPS thread has tested:

6x 1680x1050
4x 1920x1200
2x 2560x1600
1x 3840x2400

Plus you also have the HDMI port, which can drive 2560x1600 at 60 Hz or 4K at 30.

 

I have just received my brand new m3800 with the 1920x1080 screen which is very crisp in most cases . The only slight issue i am having is for some programs for example iTunes and chrome and firefox , some text and images/objects are blurry , which is really annoying. I have done the usual and disabled scaling on high dpi screens as reading many articles says this fixes the problem but it just doesn't . I have windows 8.1 running and dont know whether this is an issue i was thinking of downgrading anyway . If anyone knows how to fix this ?? or has the problem also please let me know . Thank you

 

Guys,

Mine shipped and should be here tomorrow. I could probably answer any questions you had if you post them here. I will be playing with it all day to see if its going to be kept or going back to dell. Im also in the US and ordered a few day after release.