The Glorious Resolution: Feast your eyes on 5 HiDPI laptops

EYE-POPPING goodness

Dell Precision M3800

Dell’s M3800 is a mobile workstation that delivers heavyweight performance – albeit with an equally heavyweight price tag.

Prices start at around £1,500 for a model with a conventional 1920x1080 display, but it’ll cost you £1,848.00 to step up to a "quad-HD" display with 3200x1800 resolution. However, the display is well suited to photo-editing and other graphics applications, producing a crisp, boldly coloured image with very good all-round viewing angles.

Screen real estate (click to enlarge)

It provides professional-level performance too, thanks to a quad-core Haswell i7 processor running at 2.2GHz (3.2GHz with Turboboost), 16GB of memory, and both 256GB solid-state storage and a conventional 500GB hard drive. And, to drive that pixel-packed display, the M3800 includes both an integrated HD 4600 and a discrete nVidia Quadro K100M for workstation-class graphics performance.

Running the Home and Work suites in PCMark 8 benchmarks produced scores of 2708 and 2801 points respectively. Those are, admittedly, fairly mid-range scores, but those particular tests don’t fully reflect the power of the Quadro GPU, which is designed for more specialised CAD and other high-end graphics applications.

The downside, not surprisingly, is that the High-DPI display and powerful hardware sap the battery pretty quickly. Even when using the integrated HD 4600 we could only get about four hours out of the M3800 for web browsing and streaming video, and running PCMark 8 with the nVidia GPU drained the battery in just two hours and fifty-five minutes.

Price £1,848
More info Dell