Solved! Dell Vostro 3700, worth getting?

TomD_1

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I'm thinking of getting the Dell Vostro 3700, with the core i5 430m and 4GB of ram. I'm interested in this laptop because I think it has a lot of computing power for the amount it costs. And the GT 330m will be good for gaming, and for 24" monitor i plan to use with it.

Can anyone say if I should go ahead with this laptop at around $900, or are there better laptops/notebooks out there for my budget that i should consider?
 
Solution
I just bought a Vostro 3400 with i5-520M. The packaging was so bad and they put a masking tape on top of the panel. The plastic covering the keyboard was so oversize and have several sections cut which I do not know for what reasons.
My mind said the laptop is not purely "new" and was shipped to me from a returned product maybe.
I have contacted the Dell, and they said the masking tape was for user to remove the plastic layer suppose to protect the panel, and they never come to me with an answer for the oversize plastic sheet covering the keyboard.

Found also the USB ports too loose and very hard to detect your external hard disk.

The keyboard is too soft and you sometimes missed typing words, and overall the physical of the laptop...


Yeah, but it comes at the price of the GPU. The GT 330M is faster than the HD 5470. The HDD and RAM can be upgraded later, but it is very rare for the GPU to be upgradeable in laptops.
 

Maverick4396

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Except that the GT330M is still a DX10 chip. As a matter of fact the GT330M is the same chip as a GT130 and GT230M just rebadged. The HD 5470 is a DX11 capable card.
 

TomD_1

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Thanks for the replies. That notebook does look quite tempting, although it might be better to have a faster GPU, as only a few games so far support DX11.

I should have posted this first:

1_What is your budget?
$800 - $950

2_What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
15" screen or greater

3_What screen resolution do you want?
720P or greater

4_Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
Closer to a desktop replacement then a portable

5_How much battery life do you need?
Doesn't matter

6_Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?
Team Fortress 2, L4D and Supreme Commander, on medium settings. I have an extra 24" monitor that I use occasionally, and it would be good if I could play these games on that at 1900x1200 without having frames at less then 30fps.

7_What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo / Video editing,watching movies, Etc.)
CAD design software, light audio and photo editing, watching movies.

8_How much storage (H.D.D Capacity) do you need?
Doesn't matter, as I have an external drive which I store everything on.

9_If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post the links to them.
None

10_How long do you want to keep your laptop?
4-5 years

11_What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
DVD writer

12_Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.
Any brand.


 

Maverick4396

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I would call dell and make sure that they are using the GDDR3 model of that GT330M because there is a GT330M that is GDDR2 and that would be slower than the 5470.

Either way at that resolution you would be lucky to get either card to run playable frame rates.
 


That feature really doesn't matter since the 5470 is probably not powerful enough to play DX11 games (the few that are even out). Features are nice, but if you can't use them......
 

Maverick4396

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And yet he wants to be able to keep a 900 dollar laptop for 4-5 years, so you might think that it would be a good idea to at least think ahead a couple of years and realize that by then even DX 11 is going to be an old API so supporting it might just keep his laptop lasting longer.

BTW if it were me I would try and save a bit more money up and try and get something like this to try and lengthen the time before you need a full machine again due to the upgradability of this one.
 
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A friend just spent £800 on a Dell Vostro 3700 for use with professional Firewire audio hardware and programs. The capabilities of these computer systems handling real-time data streams properly is extremely poor.
When connecting the Focusrite Saffire Firewire audio hardware the computer did not seem to be able to stream sound from the device.

I was advised to run the DPC atency checker programme on the Dell Vostro to see what the performance was like.
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

The realtime graph showed huge red spikes when the machine was in idle mode. NOT GOOD!
I then came across a thread on a message board with someone who had the same problem with another audio device - he was also getting no sound or terrible drop outs.

It turned out to be related to the battery and the software that manages this. When removing he battery and running on mains power only then the problem was solved and sound was working through the Focusrite Saffire audio Firewire device. Pro audio software was working again.
But this is still a problem, which means you cannot have the battery attached to the Dell Vostro's if you are thinking of using them for audio work or using as a DAW (digital audio workstation) - as they are draining the system performance greatly.

I suggest you DO NOT buy these machines until Dell fix the problem. This problem could even effect watching movies/DVD/games etc. The 4 pin Firewire port is also badly placed and the connection comes loose if moved slightly. So not recommended for people wishing to connect their DV cams or other Firewire hardware. A 6 pin Firewire slot with screw fixings should have been implemented in these machines.
 
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Guest

Guest
A friend just spent £800 on a Dell Vostro 3700 for use with professional Firewire audio hardware and programs. The capabilities of these computer systems handling real-time data streams properly is extremely poor.
When connecting the Focusrite Saffire Firewire audio hardware the computer did not seem to be able to stream sound from the device.

I was advised to run the DPC atency checker programme on the Dell Vostro to see what the performance was like.
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

The realtime graph showed huge red spikes when the machine was in idle mode. NOT GOOD!
I then came across a thread on a message board with someone who had the same problem with another audio device - he was also getting no sound or terrible drop outs.

It turned out to be related to the battery and the software that manages this. When removing he battery and running on mains power only then the problem was solved and sound was working through the Focusrite Saffire audio Firewire device. Pro audio software was working again.
But this is still a problem, which means you cannot have the battery attached to the Dell Vostro's if you are thinking of using them for audio work or using as a DAW (digital audio workstation) - as they are draining the system performance greatly.

I suggest you DO NOT buy these machines until Dell fix the problem. This problem could even effect watching movies/DVD/games etc. The 4 pin Firewire port is also badly placed and the connection comes loose if moved slightly. So not recommended for people wishing to connect their DV cams or other Firewire hardware. A 6 pin Firewire slot with screw fixings should have been implemented in these machines.

I bet you just need to turn off the power management features esp. the cpu thottling to be able to work without removing the bttery ;)
Did encounter bad audio latency on several laptops with power saving cpu features. Turning them off always helped.
 

guzzal

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I just bought a Vostro 3400 with i5-520M. The packaging was so bad and they put a masking tape on top of the panel. The plastic covering the keyboard was so oversize and have several sections cut which I do not know for what reasons.
My mind said the laptop is not purely "new" and was shipped to me from a returned product maybe.
I have contacted the Dell, and they said the masking tape was for user to remove the plastic layer suppose to protect the panel, and they never come to me with an answer for the oversize plastic sheet covering the keyboard.

Found also the USB ports too loose and very hard to detect your external hard disk.

The keyboard is too soft and you sometimes missed typing words, and overall the physical of the laptop is too fragile.
I do not recommend anyone to buy this product. Better buy Lenova which comes with extraordinary sound system, and extra fast running on Win 7.
 
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I hope you didn't go ahead and buy it. It is admittedly a fast machine but if there is anything wrong and you want to return it you will enter Dell hell! I wish I had read reviews of Dell on various business review websites before I bought it. You will have to deal with customer service based in the Phillipines and they are a nightmare. I am still getting nowhere after more than 2 weeks despite various defects.

Another thing that you should bear in mind is that if you wish to run any XP applications, the available memory under the Windows 7 virtual machine that runs XP apps is very small. On my model that had 3GB RAM, there was only 500MB available for running XP apps.
 

wykus

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is this really such a bad notebook if considering playing games on it. if read that the the Nvidia Geforce GT 330M 1g isn’t such a bad card after all. have any one of you benchmarked this laptop on any modern game on different settings and resolution? isn’t the 17'' gonne give low fps?
 
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I have had a Vostro 3700 for about 6 weeks. In roughly 40 years of being around computers, this is absolutely the worst experience I have ever had. The Dell Hell service remarks are all true. You can't return the thing. I have had the motherboard replaced twice as well as the Nvideo card. When the tech came out to replace the boards, he was the definition of not caring and he broke the keyboard which then had to be replaced. I have wasted roughly seven full days of my life on the phone with tech service to no avail. The remarks are true on downgrading to Xp. Plus, of four graphics cards available on this machine, only one has XP drivers. If you have a different card, it just defaults to VGA. After all this, the machine still runs maybe 30 minutes and you get the blue screen of death. This computer is so bad that I abandoned it - at only six weeks old - and bought a HP Pavilion, a brand which I have owned before. In the same environment (business) the HP just flat works. No glitches, no problems. I will never own another Dell until they fix their customer service issues. I informed Dell of all this and although they are very sorry, they are not going to do anything.
 

TomD_1

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Just thought I'd update you guys, and for the sake of anyone else who reads this thread. I went ahead and got the Vostro 3700 with the i5 430m and 4Gb of ram. So far I can happily say that I've had no problems at all within the past 8 months. I've been more than pleased with its performance, although battery life could be better.

My only minor complaints would be that the headphone jack is located in the wrong place (front of the laptop) and that the left side of the laptop gets considerably hot under load. If you have any further questions feel free to ask away.
 

jamess21037625

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How do u find the GT 330M for gaming? It's decent or not?
 

jesseplus6

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my wife plays eq2 on hers and loves it graphic are great speed is good there is no lag in game so i say go for it
 

johnt7225

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TomD_1,

I am curious, how has your CAD experience been on the 3700?

I am looking at the 3700 as a cheaper alternate to Dell's M6500. I am planning to run AutoCAD 2011, photoshop, etc.

Can it handle 3d models at all?