14 DAY TRIAL // Mobile workstations don't come out nearly as often as consumer notebooks, but when they do debut, they definitely leave a mark, sometimes a whole crater, in the perception of whoever happens to be watching and/or listening.
This occasion is definitely one of those, and it's really not shocking that these laptops don't come out all the time.
An influx of powerful laptops would give sensitive people an aneurysm, and too many of them would mean lots of high-end laptops that stay unsold. There aren't many high-end customers after all.
The powerful notebook that Dell has just launched, according to Dutch site Tweakers.net, is called Precision M3800.
Measuring 15.6 inches, it has as prime asset an LCD (liquid crystal display) with a resolution of 3200 x 1800 pixels.
Putting that native resolution to good use is an NVIDIA Quadro K1100M GPU (graphics processing unit), with 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
In turn, that discrete graphics card works thanks to and in tandem with a top-tier central processing unit (CPU) from Intel: the Core i7-4702MQ (Haswell).
Moving on, the memory capacity is, understandably enough, high, although not as high as some may expect: 16 GB DDR3 RAM.
We wouldn't have batted an eye if there were 32 GB or even more, but Dell seems to feel 16 GB is enough, and it should be really. For all that this product is on the high-end level, it's not meant to be the mightiest.
That said, storage space is provided by a hard disk drive (1 TB HDD) or a solid-state drive (512 GB SSD).
Finally, all the hardware somehow fits inside a chassis with a thickness of 18mm (around 0.7 inches) and a weight of 2kg (4.4 pounds). That's because there is no integrated docking capability.
Dell's Precision M3800 should start selling soon, for $1,699 to $1,999 / €1,699 to €1,999. If the company decides to listen to exchange rates, the EU price may even turn out lower, but we won't be holding our breath.