Ultrabooks are all about luxury, and Samsung’s Series 7 Ultra is no exception to the rule: the brushed aluminium chassis looks every inch the stylish ultraportable. Scratch the surface, however, and Samsung’s latest offering ups the ante with a Full-HD touchscreen and, most unusual of all, dedicated AMD graphics.
It’s the screen that gets the Series 7 Ultra off to a flying start – the 13.3in Full-HD panel is superb. There isn’t even the tiniest hint of grain introduced by the touch layer, and the silky-feeling, gloss finish makes it a pleasure to flick, pinch and tap your way through Windows 8.
The image quality is deliciously vibrant, too. Photographs and movies flourish with natural skin tones and lifelike, saturated colours; the average Delta E of 3.1 also proves that colour accuracy is well up to par. The IPS panel’s brightness level of 322cd/m2 helps it to remain legible in bright conditions, and although the contrast ratio of 786:1 is a little behind the best Ultrabooks – the non-touch, Full-HD panel of Dell’s XPS 13 reached a stunning 1,034:1 – most people will be unlikely to be able to tell the difference. It’s a cracking all-round display.
Even before you dab the Samsung’s power button, it looks every inch the high-end Ultrabook. The brushed metal finish is honed to a silky-smooth sheen, and we love the minimalist, unfussy styling. Burly build quality extends all around, and the Series 7 Ultra feels flex-free and amazingly sturdy no matter how much you twist and press on the chassis. That hefty build adds a few hundred grams to the overall weight, though – at 1.6kg, the Samsung is considerably heavier than stick-thin laptops such as Sony’s 1.05kg VAIO Pro 13.
The Samsung also excels on a practical level. The Scrabble-tile keyboard is backlit, and quality is superb: the solid base and snappy action make up for the slight lack of travel, and we were quickly up to speed thanks to the full-sized, widely spaced keys. The sizeable trackpad is great, too – it feels lovely under the finger, and responds quickly to Windows 8’s variety of gestures.
On the inside, Samsung has included something that few of its Ultrabook rivals can match – a discrete GPU. The chip used here is a Radeon HD 8570M, but it isn’t exactly a high-end part: its architecture is based on last year’s HD 7000-series, and it has only 384 stream processors clocked to a modest 650MHz.
Still, it’s a welcome addition, and provides markedly more power than Intel’s integrated graphics chips. In our low-quality Crysis test, at 1,366 x 768, the HD 8570M helped the Samsung to a smooth average of 60fps – a result that puts it well ahead of the 42fps scored by the Dell XPS 13’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 core. For casual gaming, the extra horsepower of the AMD GPU will make all the difference.
Disappointingly, there’s no sign of Intel’s Haswell processors – instead, Samsung has installed an Ivy Bridge Core i5-3337U alongside a 128GB LiteOn SSD. The combination isn’t quite as quick as the Core i7 CPU and 256GB LiteOn SSD in Dell’s XPS 13, but it isn’t far off. The Samsung’s score of 0.66 in our Real World Benchmarks is hot on the heels of the 0.73 scored by the Dell, and it’s only a whisker behind the Haswell Core i5 CPU in Sony’s VAIO Pro 13, which scored 0.68.
The Series 7 Ultra partners its solid all-round performance with impressive reserves of stamina. In our light-use battery test, the Samsung clung on for an impressive 8hrs 38mins. That’s quite a bit behind Sony’s VAIO Pro 13 and Apple’s latest Macbook Air 13-inch – both of which lasted well over 10 hours in the same test – but it’s a great result considering the Samsung’s last-generation CPU and dedicated GPU.
Samsung has put the Samsung’s slightly thicker chassis to good use in other areas. There are two USB 2 ports, a USB 3 port, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack and an SD card reader, as well as the rare sight of a Gigabit Ethernet port. There’s also a mini-VGA port, but you’ll need to shell out extra cash for a proprietary adapter. Wireless connectivity, meanwhile, sees dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi join forces with Bluetooth 4.
The Samsung is a little pricier than several of its nearest competitors, not to mention a fair bit heavier, but this classy Ultrabook has the goods it where it counts. With a stunning touchscreen, best-in-class graphics performance and a long-lasting battery, it’s easy to forgive the Series 7 Ultra’s minor flaws. Those after the lightest possible Ultrabook would do well to consider Sony’s featherweight VAIO Pro 13 instead, but if you can live with a few extra grams in your bag, the Series 7 Ultra is a delight.
The best price we found for this device was $1335.
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