Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook Review

Performance

The Series 5 specs’ are pretty decent, though not overwhelmingly impressive. You get a energy consumption but fairly powerful i5-2467M CPU, 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3, 128GB SSD, and on-chip graphics.

PCMark 7

PCMark 7 gives a good overview of the entire system by testing multiple general areas.
As you would expect, the results are not incredible, seeing as it is a low-power laptop. Video playback was smooth, image manipulation was fine, and web browsing/decryption gave no issues.
The graphics test lagged pretty bad though due to the lack of a discrete graphics card.

3DMark Vantage

The 3DMark suite of benchmarks are made to test the gaming performance of a system. Vantage specifically targets DirectX 10, which is the highest the on-chip graphics can support.
As you can probably guess, the Series 5 didn’t do very well. This is not a gaming laptop and because of that was only able to pull off a little over 3fps in the GPU tests. The CPU tests were equally as bad. We aren’t going to hold this against it though since it is not what the machine was designed for.

AS SSD

AS SSD gives us an idea of raw storage speeds. As you would expect with a Samsung SSD inside, the Series 5 scored very high, pulling off 480MBs read and 308MBs write. The speed of the OS drive is what is going to make the biggest impact on how snappy a PC feels, so going for the 128GB SSD will make a big improvement.

Battery Performance

With a portable, low-power laptop such as this one, battery performance is very important. Not only battery life, but charge time too. If you can’t have your 3.25lb 13.3″ laptop away from an outlet for any length of time, then what’s the point?

After going through 3-4 charge cycles, I was averaging about 5 hours on a full charge. This was with middle-of-the-road power saving features. In an aggressive power saving mode (dim quickly, low brightness, etc.) you may be able to get closer to the claimed 6.5 hrs.
Charge time was pretty good too. Going from 5% to 80% took only 1hr 45min and 5% to 100% took 2hrs 30min. You can throw it on the charger for an hour or so and get yourself a couple hours of run time, exactly what you need for an on-the-go laptop such as this.

Audio Quality

The Series 5 comes with two 2W speakers located under the front edge and they are actually surprisingly decent for a laptop. They are still tinny with very little bass (as you would expect from a speaker that small), but they are crisp and get fairly loud. The onboard audio is also surprisingly good through a pair of headphones, giving a nice crisp sound, though it is a little shallow.

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