Samsung Series 7 Gamer Review

Samsungs Series 7 Gamer is one of the new line of laptops like Alienware, it packs high-end components, comes in $1,899 configuration. It weighs 8.39 pounds and packing lot of power. It features a quad-core Core i7-3610QM Processor (with 3.3GHz Turbo Boost), 16GB DDR3 RAM, NVidia GeForce GTX 675M graphics, 1.5TB HDD 7,200RPM with ExpressCache, a Blu-Ray Drive, and a 1,920*1,080 pixel resolution with 17-inch display. Does the Samsung Series 7 Gamer Laptop fit the profile of Gaming laptops?

Hardware

It features a metal design ringed with a black paint and Samsung used a glossy coating, which makes the laptop a serious fingerprint magnet. The lid features a Samsung logo along with the right side that lights up a glossy white, and two massive cooling vents on its hindquarters. It got an enormous 17-inch screen surrounded in a matte black bezel with a silver Samsung logo. Below that you can find a glossy silver speaker bar on the left side of which sit the Gamers soft touch volume, mute, Wi-Fi and keyboard backlit buttons. On the right side of the speaker there is a four-way Mode Dial. You can switch between four power modes Green, Library, Balanced, and Gaming. It tunes the rig to save the power.

In the starboard side it got a Blu-ray drive, flanked by a pair of USB 2.0 ports, on the machines left edge got 2 USB 3.0 ports, a multi reader, outputs for HDMI, VGA And Display Port, Ethernet, and a spot of AC Adapter. The exceptions are the “WASD” keys, which darken to a serious red. Crimson circles now surround the power and volume controls, pulsating along with the sound coming from the machine’s stereo speakers. The machines keyboard was poor, the island style adopt a classic laptop keyboard with slightly curved caps that bump up against each other. You can activate the backlighting by setting the Mode Dial to either Balanced or Game Mode. In Balanced Mode, the backlight gives off soft blue glow. In Game Mode the backlight changes to a deep Blue and turns the WASD keys Bright Red. It makes a rigs keyboard a pleasure to write with feels just as good in games. The Gamers Track Pad is easy to brush with your palm while youre pecking the keyboard. A quick Fn combination disables the Track Pad, if necessary. The Pad actually works well, its large and sensitive. It does picks up most gestures; there is no substitute for proper gaming mouse, so pick up the machine with proper accessories.

The Gamers LED-backlit, 400-nit SuperBright Plus Panel is very nice in the machine. It got 1,920*1,080 resolution looks glass and its a eye melting experience to say gamers strive for. The rigs visual fidelity fades a bit when you view the screen from too far off center and while watching the 1080p movie trailer is looks sharp.

The Gamer comes with two stereo speakers and a built-in mini-subwoofer. The audio impressed us, but when we turned on included Dolby Home Theatre v4 audio software, the sounds exploded from the speakers, the high pitched sounds arent particularly tiny. A deep full Bass is also absent, and more subtle, complex undertones may well go unheard. The gamers looking for a virtualized surround sound trick to help them audibly pinpoint enemy footsteps wont find much purchase here. So, the gamers looking for the on-board audio options will be disappointed and there is no substitute for a good headset.

The Gamers 2MP webcam captured surprisingly grainy images of our face. The images and video had the look of grainy, even when sitting in a well-lit room. Images taken in a dimly lit room still offered a surprising amount of detail, but remained grainy.

Here is the full specs of the device

Performance

The Samsung Series 7 Gamer got a impressive specs, it is paired with a 2.3GHz Core i7 CPU 93.3GHz Turbo Boost) and 16GB of DDR3 RAM, NVIDIAs GTX 675 GPU, it captures its essence on rigs native 1,920*1,080 resolution at ultra-high quality. It runs Crysis — though not quite as well as it runs modern games. The five-year-old resource hog clocked 33fps on high settings, with maximum fidelity knocking an extra 10 points off its score. The Series 7 Gamer shrug off every gaming challenge pitted against it. The Gamer managed to transfer 4.97GB of mixed media files in 2 minutes and 33 seconds at a rate of 33.3 MBps. It is really a surprise to see the gamer survives; Multiple browser application, each with dozen of active tabs, Photoshop, two word processors, Twitter, Facebook, and Spotify, but it survived that day. Its 1.5GB HDD boots in less than 35 seconds and waking from sleep in six.

The Series 7 Gamers 8-cell Li-ion battery suffers a short batter life. Tuning on to the standard run-down parameters, the Gamer lasted two hours and 10 minutes before reaching a certain low certainly not bad for a gaming laptop. The Gamers Green Mode improved matters slightly and it nets an extra 20 minutes of runtime. If you lug the Gamer to a LAN party and forget your AC adapter, you won’t be playing much its GPU wont run at full battery without an external power source.

Software

Samsung includes software with Series 7 Gamer, includes Easy Migration for transferring data from your old laptop to Series 7. Easy File Share helps you wirelessly transfer files between PCs and Easy Software Manager provides a quick, painless way to update all of the Series 7 Gamer’s software and drivers.Samsung also equipped with Series 7 with the company’s Recovery Solution 5, Microsoft Office 2010 Starter and the obligatory trial copy of Symantec’s Norton Internet Security 2011.

It still leaves users to stumble over unnecessary bloatware. PC gamers sighted in the machine’s hardcore reticule typically know their way around a Windows machine, and will resent being babied by would-be companion software that further dumbs down Microsoft’s vanilla experience. The Mode Shift Manager got some useful settings disabling the trackpad and Windows key while in Game mode, toggling the color optimization for setting but the depth of customization it offers leaves us wanting and we were disappointed to find the software wasn’t open to creating custom themes and transitions. Samsung offers are useful and functional, but we still ache for the potential tweaks we couldn’t make.

For: Gorgeous Display, Blazing Processor and Graphics

Against: Audio Quality, Webcam, Bloatware

Conclusion

Overall the laptop is one of the top performers in its class, but the price tag of $1,900 seems high. The Series 7 Gamer lives up to its handle. Despite the minor gripes, we cant deny the excellence in performance and graphics. The average speakers, trackpad, and bloatware might be a slight disappointment, but the flaws are outshined by the 400-nit display and the power pack performance.