A powerful and eye-catching laptop – so,
what is the disadvantage?
Gamer laptop can be an interesting series.
While the idea of having a laptop powerful enough to play the newest games is
very attractive, in fact, it is much more limited.
Accessories you need for such activities
usually means that this device will be bulky, heavy, and has short battery
life. Suddenly, these gamer laptops sound not very dynamic. They are also
expensive and do not offer the capabilities of cable enhance or overclocking of
desktop game players.
When mentioning battery life, some recent
gamer laptops have managed to avoid the barrier. Novatech nSpire 2760 Black
Edition provides 3 hours 15 minutes of use, which is relatively acceptable –
but it is devalued due to its less attractive bulky chassis.
PC Format has
witnessed more normal gamer laptops than the good ones, so a new product in
this segment like Samsung Series 7 Gamer needs to prove many things, especially
when it requires a price of $2,160. Can it improve nSpire 2760’s battery life
while proving better design than competitors such as Alienware M18X and Acer
Aspire Ethos 8951G?
Specs options
Having suitable specs on gamer laptop is
essential. Basing on so powerful accessories does not only increase the
laptop’s price considerably, but also reduces battery life, and may make the
laptop become overheated and useless. On the other hand, reducing many things
can lead to the fact that a gamer laptop struggles with games at high settings,
and soon becomes outdated.
So, does Samsung Series 7 Gamer have
suitable balance to justify its price? Everything sounds to be good when
mentioning the processor – Samsung 7 Gamer has Intel Core i7-2670QM overclocked
up to 2.20GHz. While this CPU’s performance is far behind some desktop
brothers, it is still one of the best dynamic processors currently. With 4
cores and Hyperthreading technology for 8 threads at once, it is quite
powerful. The good news is that it just uses 45 watts of power, taking the pressure
out of the battery.
2670QM is built on Sandy Bridge
architecture, which means a graphics processing unit is built into a CPU core.
Right, it is a good addition, but useless for a laptop that wants to proves its
ability to play game. With that, you need specialized graphics card, and this
is included by AMD Radeon HD 6970M GDDR5 2GB. A good choice for Samsung since
it is an extremely well-dynamic GPU will process most new games on the highest
settings.
Important
statistics
Price: $2,160
Producer: Samsung
Web: www.samsung.com
Operating system: Windows 7 Home
Premium
Processor: Intel Core i7-2670QM
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6790 2GB
Storage: two 750GB hard drives (1.5TB)
SKU: NP700G7A-S01UK
|
Additional size
This graphics core also provides support
for AMD 3D technology version – AMD HD3D. While HD3D cannot be compared to 3D
Vision – mainly because AMD comes late in the 3D party – it is quite good for
many compatible games provided by the third-party developers. So, what you need
is 3D monitor. Wait, Samsung 7 Gamer also includes that by inserting Samsung 3D
glasses. Together with Blu-ray drive, it makes Samsung Series 7 Gamer become a
ready laptop for game and media’s future.
8GB DDR3 RAM helps to keep everything run
smoothly, and 1.5TB hard drive provides quite a lot of space for game. Without
SSD, what a pity, but in general, Samsung Series 7 Gamer’s general specs are
perfect.
One of the first think you will notice when
starting it is that the interesting Windows 7 desktop theme keeps the design
principle from keyboard and body device – think of blue lights and bright
rounds – and an acomapnied unique desktop tool lets you change some show-off
visual factors.
Custom mouse pointer is a small bother. It
has a blue round next to the arrow, which makes it look like as if Windows 7 is
loading continuously. Fortunately, you can turn it off.
Dynamic wallpaper only appears in Game mode
– where the focus is put on graphics power. Needless to say, a connection with
power-point is essential. Other power modes are ‘Balanced’, ‘Library’ – an
interesting name for the mute button – and ‘Green’ mode saving battery, which
dims the screen’s brightness, turns Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off and carries out
other power saving tasks. All these modes can be switched with a dial on top of
the keyboard.
Meanwhile, the 3DMark and Cinebench were
quite good (3DMark reached 18,415 scores and Cinebench R10 reached 8,603),
which proves that Samsung Series 7 Gamer has enough capability in the newest
graphics. However, game experience in the world was quite irregular. Laptop had
been hung many times, and turned off unsuitably. We cannot help supposing all
dynamic wallpapers and attractive themes use so many resources of Samsung and
make the laptop slower than what is suggested by its specs – or price.
Skyrim was
hung when we first loaded it, but after restarting, we were able to load it. It
is not the graphically heaviest game, but is a quite nice game, and we set all
graphics settings to Ultra. Happily, Samsung Series 7 Gamer well-processed it
with stable frame speed even during the scenes full of actions. It is not
perfect, and has 1 or 2 pauses and unsmoothnesses when playing – even scrolling
over menus – but in general, it does well.
However, the praise is not only for
accessories that are controlling this laptop – the great 17-inch screen plays a
big role in making the game look very nice. The screen does not only have 3D
ability but also process the 1,920 x 1,080 resolution – a quite scarce control
in laptop, even gamer laptops. Blu-ray films look very fresh on laptop with the
Cyberlink Power DVD 10 software packed in advance, and built-in speakers well
process the sound – and are loud enough so that you do not need to buy external
speakers.
Nevertheless, battery life is
disappointing, just reaches more than 1 hour at full setting. Novatech nSpire
2760 Black Edition has nothing to worry in this side.
In general, Samsung Series 7 Gamer is quite
odd with its specs. Based on accessories, it will be an outstanding laptop, but
when using it, we could not get addicted to it. It has graphics power to
process the newest games, but even in Win7, it does not feel fast or perfect as
often seen. Anyway, it does not do enough to justify its over-high price.
Verdict
A laptop should be much better according to
its specs.
