Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Not necessarily. None of these problems affects everyone. The coil whine seems to affect more people than it skips, but not everyone affected (myself included) is bothered much by it. Sure in an ideal world it would be gone, but other laptops even from other vendors have exhibited this same noise. The stuff being discussed more recently I've only seen 1-3 reports of, and I've been following both the XPS 15 Haswell and the M3800 threads from the very beginning. I'm completely happy with my XPS 15. Many other customers are happy as well, with the exception of coil whine and a handful of other gripes that arise because nothing is perfect for everybody, but even with those issues most people are just irritated by them on principle, not driven to the point of returning it over those issues.

The bottom line is that if you read enough forum posts on ANY reasonably popular laptop, you're going to find people reporting all sorts of bizarre issues and customers complaining about one thing or another. That doesn't indicate that there are systemic design flaws with that laptop that affect all units, merely that given a sufficiently large reporting population, you're going to have a few anomalous issues. Read a few hundred pages of forum posts about those alternative machines that were suggested and see how you feel about them after all that.

The XPS 15 Wiki has a Common Complaints page that details the issues that have been somewhat widely reported -- but many of those issues also have documented fixes: http://xps-15.wikia.com/wiki/Common_Complaints.

 

Ouh, I think you got me wrong. I was complaining about the latest Lenovo ThinkPads. Back in mid January, there were no BIOS versions, which could fix those problems. One had to deactive some BIOS features in order to (mostly) avoid data corruption issues; meanwhile, there should be a BIOS update, since I haven't heard about any new cases (eventhough I haven't checked the latest BIOS changelogs).

As for the M3800, I haven't come across about any data corruptions issues. It's running just fine! Other than the dropping WLAN-connection (fix for Linux: disable Wireless N via modprobe.conf) and the rather soft aluminium top, I haven't come across any serious issues. At the moment, I don't have any scratches or dents on the aluminium top, but I still would be catious, when transporting it.

Btw: does someone know about the caseable.com notebook sleeves? They look awesome and are just what I've looked for, I'm planning to get my hands on one, but I'm unsure, whether the M3800 / XPS 15 will fit or not.

//Edit: I've just updated my ArchLinux system to Kernel 3.14 and I'm blown away!! My CPU now fully underclocks to 800 MHz when Idling, resulting in about 4W extra savings - this leads to a discharge rate of about 8.5W - 9W, resulting in about 20% - 30% longer battery life, WOW!

 

I'll do a test next time this happens and report results. Hopefully it never happens again!

 

About the coil whine issue: I have a new theory, why this problem is more noticeable for some users and less noticeable for others (like me). Afaik, the coil whine issue is Nvidia K1100M related and in Windows, Nvidia Optimus activates / deactivates the K1100M according to the GPU load. Currently under Linux, Nvidia Optimus isn't working fully automatically and the user has to use the commandline in order to activate the Nvidia GPU for specific programs and so has more control over the Nvidia GPU. As I said, I'm very rarely experiencing the coil whine issue, when rare requirements are met (fully loaded battery, GPU load, PSU connected) and others experience it while browsing the web. So, I think, that there are big differencies for Linux and Windows in terms of coil whine issue, due to the different nature of Nvidia Optimus on both platforms.

 

But how do you explain the coil whine for XPS 15, which doesn't have K1100M?

 

I use Linux with Bumblebee, and I rarely activate the Nvidia card -in my case Geforce, being the XPS-. I do have a strong low pitched noise when scrolling and 3D rendering (when the Intel GPU is working), like from a hard disk but much stronger, and a different, weaker high-pitched noise when doing heavy CPU calculations.

 

I brought up the USB (ports don't work every so often) and battery issues (full charge on AC, still on AC, computer restarts and battery shows 10% and starts charging again) I'm having with DELL and they offered to swap out my m3800 with a brand new once since I am within my 30 days.

I am worried that I"ll get a machine with even more issues than my current one though.

What are your guys thoughts on doing a machine swap?

 

You should take a look at the most recent few pages of the XPS 15 Haswell thread. The source of the coil whine has been identified. It's -- wait for it... -- a coil. Specifically, a coil on the motherboard near the battery. A member took an oscilloscope reader to all of the coils on the system and found the one producing excess electrical noise. There is currently an effort to identify the exact specs of that coil based on the information printed on it and then source a compatible higher-quality coil elsewhere. The member who made the discovery may even try to replace said coil with a soldering iron since he believes it should be fairly straightforward from what he can see on the motherboard.

This problem is definitely not specific to the K1100M or even the GPU -- though if it had been the latter, the fact that it existed on both the M3800 and XPS 15 could be explained by the fact that in all likelihood the two GPUs use identical silicon and simply different firmware, drivers, and possibly different paths bridged or unbridged as a hardware access control method to the Quadro advanced features. Back in the Athlon XP CPU days, I remember certain paths on the top of the lower-end CPUs were severed by AMD to lock the CPU multiplier; you had to pay extra to get a version that had those paths intact and gave you an unlocked multiplier for easier overclocking. Well there was so little current that ran across those paths when they were connected that you could simply "color in" the space between the severed links with a #2 pencil, and presto, the graphite conducted enough electricity to unlock your multiplier.

 

Knocking on wood, I have none of these problems and am very happy with the machine.

 

I have experienced the coil whine exactly once. I had completely drained the battery to the point of shut down, then while recharging heard it when the battery was about 92-97%. It then went away once fully charged. Have not heard it since.