This review is from: Samsung Series 5 NP530U4B-A01US 14-Inch Ultrabook (Silver) (Personal Computers)
I purchased this laptop after my Thinkpad from 6 years ago finally gave up the ghost. What I wanted in a laptop was something that was very portable, but didn’t compromise any system specifications in making it so. I decided to purchase this laptop after a little bit of thinking, since it has some really solid system specifications. Granted, it’s only been a few weeks, but overall I have been quite pleased with the purchase.
Display/Speakers The 14 inch screen is nice and bright, and has 1366×768 max resolution. For me, this resolution is perfect. Probably what I like the most about the display is the matte finish. Glossy finishes may be snazzy and shiny, for those who are attracted to shiny things, but the matte finish really makes it much easier to see the display in daylight. The speakers are pretty much what you’d expect for laptop speakers.
Keyboard/Trackpad I have to admit that prior to purchasing this laptop I was wary of the keyboard, since the display unit in the store had a lot of keyboard flex. When I got home, however, I have been pleased to report that the flex on this computer is nearly non-existent. It took me a little bit to become accustomed to the shallow keyboard, since on my last laptop, the keyboard felt like a regular desktop keyboard. Now that I have become accustomed to the shallow profile, I’ve found that the keyboard is quite good. There are things that can be improved, like backlighting, and including some kind of an indicator on the hardware that you have caps lock on instead of relying on the short-lived on-screen notification. I did have to adjust the settings on the trackpad to address accidental palm touches while typing, but after making the adjustment (the manual details how to get to the necessary screen), I have no real issues. On the subject of the trackpad, it’s quite large, and plenty sensitive. The trackpad is programmed by default to respond to gestures similar to what you’d expect for MacBook. While it wasn’t directly discussed in the manual how to set the trackpad for scrolling based on edge input on the trackpad, I was able to get to the correct settings menu to enable this feature. The trackpad has two buttons, instead of what you see many times now with laptops where the buttons are a part of the touchpad.
Cooling This is probably my favorite part of this computer. Historically I have not necessarily been good to my laptops when it comes to cooling. I tend to compute in bed. I suspect that a good portion of my former laptop’s issues were actually because I didn’t let it properly cool. Regardless, I am quite pleased with this computer’s cooling system. It is completely silent. Completely. I can hear it, just barely, if I put the computer right next to my ear. It’s that quiet. The cooling system uses vents that are located on the bottom and ejects the heated air into the hinge. Even then, the heated air isn’t really all that hot. It’s more slightly warm air. I will say that if you use the computer for hours on end, you will notice the keyboard becoming slightly warm, but in terms of warm laptops, this is not a temperature I typically concern myself with. I’ve been watching the internal temperature too, and I’ve never seen it go above 68C, most of the time being around 50C, and that’s when running some processor-intense programs.
Performance/Ports/bloatware/wireless card As far as the performance goes – This is definitely the best performing machine I’ve ever owned, probably even the best performing that I’ve ever used. The SSD in combination with the quad core processor makes this a very enjoyable experience. After getting my computer set up, it took 23 seconds to completely boot up, and 6 seconds to return from sleep. This was before running a boot time optimization setting that Samsung includes with the computer. For the sake of ….ahem… research, I even ran this laptop through a grueling test – the Civilization V test. The computer handled the middle-of-the-road graphics settings like a pro. I didn’t try the higher-level graphics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it performed well under those circumstances as well. The computer has a smattering of ports, none of which I’ve had a chance to use yet save the USB ports, but I will surely be happy that they’re there when I need them. The same kind of philosophy applies for the DVD drive. While I don’t use it every day, I do use it for things like backups, and am happy to have the option. The wireless works flawlessly. I actually get a much better signal reading on the laptop than I do on my other devices, and that’s when the devices are directly next to the laptop. I will say that I am a bit disappointed that Samsung chose to include bloatware on this otherwise fabulous machine. Luckily I was able to uninstall them, but it’s frustrating nevertheless. Also, one of the big draws to this machine was the large…
After I’d operated with a decent late 2009-vintage gaming laptop for home primary use and a netbook for my commute, and having built a gaming desktop, I found myself wanting to make some changes in how I operate my computers. I’m a systems engineer/administrator and really, really persnickity about my technology needs, and I’d already sampled the Asus Zenbook and Acer Aspire S3 – completely unusable if you’re a decent typist. The HP Folio 13 seems to garner high reviews, but I have serious distrust of their support and build quality, reviews aside.
In any case, I ordered the Samsung Series 5. This is a good ultrabook if you don’t need it to store all the data you’ll ever have – the SSD is an amazing performer, but it’s small after Samsung’s recovery partition is set up. If you’re an advanced user, you can delete it and probably have the wherewithal to do a barebones Win 7 install from the ground up. But if you’re like me and want one travel notebook and don’t mind not being able to play hardcore 3D games on it, you could do a lot worse in an ultrabook. 802.11n wireless networking performance over a Verizon FiOS router/modem is quite nice and USB 3.0 improved the performance of my main flash drive.
The keyboard is perfect, and Samsung chose to go with a nicely sized Elan multitouch touchpad instead of the clickpad that other ultrabooks and laptops are using to ape Mac products. I like this layout – I never have to worry about resting one thumb on a button and having it impact touchpad use. Two easily-clickable buttons, a well-customizable multitouch touchpad, and a very good keyboard without the quirky sensitivity of the Zenbook means this is probably one of the best typing ultrabooks on the market today. The only drawback: it’s not backlit. I’m a good typist so normal use isn’t an issue, but it’s been a minor fumble to adjust the brightness in the dark.
Appearance: 4 out of 5 Samsung has done a decent job of making a nice, sexy looking laptop. I dock it because the outer materials feel like plastic. I can’t tell if it’s metal with a plastic veneer, but it is definitely not the smooth black metallic surface of the way more expensive Series 9. However, it’s not the chintzy plastic of the Toshiba Z830 or Z835. The surfaces blend well into each other and the front part of the laptop has a curve that lips upward from the bottom part. It had a lot of wow factor when I showed it to my co-workers. Moreover, Samsung proves that it knows people will be using this ultrabook in environments where lights are lit up – no glossy screen here! I could clearly see the display with the sun shining behind me on the train. The 1366×768 resolution display is perfectly fine for 720p HD video, and the integrated graphics would probably have issues with real 1080p content anyway.
Portability: 5 out of 5 Okay, this should be the singular standard by which a current 13.3″ ultrabook is measured. My Asus T101MT convertible netbook was 2.8lbs to the Series 5′s 3.24lbs. The Asus was smaller, leading it to feel denser when it was in my light-load single-strap ergo backpack with my rooted Touchpad, papers, and small load of tech tools. I don’t feel the weight difference since the Series 5′s weight is well distributed for its size. I can carry it in one hand for a decent amount of time while walking around.
Functionality: 4 out of 5 This is a beastly performer of a laptop, I won’t lie. I timed it over three cold boots and it went from no power whatsoever to a usable Windows desktop – services and startup applications launched and running – on an average of 17.375 seconds. This is phenomenal for any machine; I’ve only gotten close to that on my homebuilt PC when it was fresh, and that boots off a Kingston SSD. I’m told – no direct means to confirm yet – that the SSD itself is Samsung components, as is its controller. It loses points, though, for battery life: with wireless on and connected, a hi10p h.264 MKV video playing, 9 Google Chrome tabs open (one of which is Google Docs and the other is a Java IRC session) with the screen at medium brightness, it projects battery life at 100% charge to be 4 hours, 15 minutes. While that’s better than my netbook, which had a lower-voltage processor, I was hoping that throttling down to “Silent mode” would increase battery life. Also, it has noticeable heat on the bottom left hand part of the laptop. It’s not as bad as it could be, but I wish there was more of a spaced-out means of letting the heat venilate. It felt OK on my leg, though, but sitting on a memory-foam sleeve caused it to heat up noticeably.
Software/bloatware: 3 out of 5 There’s a lot of crap on this laptop. If you’re Joe Consumer, it’s safe for you to uninstall Norton Antivirus and use the free, effective Microsoft Security Essentials. If you’re an IT professional, you’re going to tear your hair out over how much…
This review is from: Samsung Series 5 NP530U4B-A01US 14-Inch Ultrabook (Silver) (Personal Computers)
I bought this laptop for my wife at best buy. She wanted a thin and light laptop preferably with a dvd drive (although personally I think a dvd drive is not really essential anymore these days) I looked at a lot of “ultrabooks”, including the acer s3, the asus zenbook, and so on.
This Samsung sticks out for 3 reasons:
1. it has a dvd drive 2. its 14 inches instead of 11 or 13,3 inches like most “ultrabooks 3. and most importantly it has a matte screen (more about that later)
While Samsung likes to call this an ultrabook (when you start up the first time, you even get a pop-up with the word Ultrabook and the Intel logo), this laptop does not qualify the Intel standards of an ultrabook. While its light, its heavier then the other ultrabooks (the dvd drive and the 14 inch screen are to blame). Something what I found very nice is the adapter that comes with the laptop. While they are normally very bulky and heavy, the power adapter is very small (about 1/4 of my Sony Vaio adapter) and light. An extra benefit for when you are carrying this laptop with you.
This laptop comes equipped with a 500gb hard drive and a 16gb ssd from Sandisk for the booting and waking up. This makes that the laptop boots rather fast (20 to 30 seconds) but all other tasks go on normal speed (because of the normal hard drive). The fact that it doesn’t have a full pledge ssd drive has it advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side you have more storage (500 gb), on the min side, its less fast.
The biggest plus and the main reason to choose this “ultrabook” is the fact that it has a matte screen. Samsung seems to be the only laptop manufacturer for the moment that understands the need for this kind of laptop to have a non reflective screen. The whole idea of making laptops more portable is so you can bring them everywhere and use whenever and wherever you want. Now you can also do this in daylight. The viewing angles are also very good.
I did have a problem with the Wifi on this model. This is however not Samsung’s fault but with the intel wireless card. I had to change a setting in my verizon router (disable the qos) for it to make a stable connection with my network (took me a while to figure this out), but luckily there is google and other people with similar problems
overall this is a very good laptop. the build quality is very nice. Its heavier then other ultrabooks. If you want a lighter more portable one, I suggest you look at the 13,3 inch version of this model (you do loose the dvd drive)
One last thing. On the forum here on Amazon there was some confusion about the graphics. Some press releases by Samsung mention that this model comes equipped with a separate graphics card (also mentioned in the Amazon description), this is however not the case. It has the intel shared graphics. Its more then enough for the daily stuff, but you will not be playing the latest games with this machine (the bottleneck for the Windows rating was the graphics, by the way)
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Authors bio is coming up shortly. 
Overall Good.,
I purchased this laptop after my Thinkpad from 6 years ago finally gave up the ghost. What I wanted in a laptop was something that was very portable, but didn’t compromise any system specifications in making it so. I decided to purchase this laptop after a little bit of thinking, since it has some really solid system specifications. Granted, it’s only been a few weeks, but overall I have been quite pleased with the purchase.
Display/Speakers
The 14 inch screen is nice and bright, and has 1366×768 max resolution. For me, this resolution is perfect. Probably what I like the most about the display is the matte finish. Glossy finishes may be snazzy and shiny, for those who are attracted to shiny things, but the matte finish really makes it much easier to see the display in daylight. The speakers are pretty much what you’d expect for laptop speakers.
Keyboard/Trackpad
I have to admit that prior to purchasing this laptop I was wary of the keyboard, since the display unit in the store had a lot of keyboard flex. When I got home, however, I have been pleased to report that the flex on this computer is nearly non-existent. It took me a little bit to become accustomed to the shallow keyboard, since on my last laptop, the keyboard felt like a regular desktop keyboard. Now that I have become accustomed to the shallow profile, I’ve found that the keyboard is quite good. There are things that can be improved, like backlighting, and including some kind of an indicator on the hardware that you have caps lock on instead of relying on the short-lived on-screen notification. I did have to adjust the settings on the trackpad to address accidental palm touches while typing, but after making the adjustment (the manual details how to get to the necessary screen), I have no real issues. On the subject of the trackpad, it’s quite large, and plenty sensitive. The trackpad is programmed by default to respond to gestures similar to what you’d expect for MacBook. While it wasn’t directly discussed in the manual how to set the trackpad for scrolling based on edge input on the trackpad, I was able to get to the correct settings menu to enable this feature. The trackpad has two buttons, instead of what you see many times now with laptops where the buttons are a part of the touchpad.
Cooling
This is probably my favorite part of this computer. Historically I have not necessarily been good to my laptops when it comes to cooling. I tend to compute in bed. I suspect that a good portion of my former laptop’s issues were actually because I didn’t let it properly cool. Regardless, I am quite pleased with this computer’s cooling system. It is completely silent. Completely. I can hear it, just barely, if I put the computer right next to my ear. It’s that quiet. The cooling system uses vents that are located on the bottom and ejects the heated air into the hinge. Even then, the heated air isn’t really all that hot. It’s more slightly warm air. I will say that if you use the computer for hours on end, you will notice the keyboard becoming slightly warm, but in terms of warm laptops, this is not a temperature I typically concern myself with. I’ve been watching the internal temperature too, and I’ve never seen it go above 68C, most of the time being around 50C, and that’s when running some processor-intense programs.
Performance/Ports/bloatware/wireless card
As far as the performance goes – This is definitely the best performing machine I’ve ever owned, probably even the best performing that I’ve ever used. The SSD in combination with the quad core processor makes this a very enjoyable experience. After getting my computer set up, it took 23 seconds to completely boot up, and 6 seconds to return from sleep. This was before running a boot time optimization setting that Samsung includes with the computer. For the sake of ….ahem… research, I even ran this laptop through a grueling test – the Civilization V test. The computer handled the middle-of-the-road graphics settings like a pro. I didn’t try the higher-level graphics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it performed well under those circumstances as well. The computer has a smattering of ports, none of which I’ve had a chance to use yet save the USB ports, but I will surely be happy that they’re there when I need them. The same kind of philosophy applies for the DVD drive. While I don’t use it every day, I do use it for things like backups, and am happy to have the option. The wireless works flawlessly. I actually get a much better signal reading on the laptop than I do on my other devices, and that’s when the devices are directly next to the laptop. I will say that I am a bit disappointed that Samsung chose to include bloatware on this otherwise fabulous machine. Luckily I was able to uninstall them, but it’s frustrating nevertheless. Also, one of the big draws to this machine was the large…
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|An impressive ultrabook well worth consideration,
After I’d operated with a decent late 2009-vintage gaming laptop for home primary use and a netbook for my commute, and having built a gaming desktop, I found myself wanting to make some changes in how I operate my computers. I’m a systems engineer/administrator and really, really persnickity about my technology needs, and I’d already sampled the Asus Zenbook and Acer Aspire S3 – completely unusable if you’re a decent typist. The HP Folio 13 seems to garner high reviews, but I have serious distrust of their support and build quality, reviews aside.
In any case, I ordered the Samsung Series 5. This is a good ultrabook if you don’t need it to store all the data you’ll ever have – the SSD is an amazing performer, but it’s small after Samsung’s recovery partition is set up. If you’re an advanced user, you can delete it and probably have the wherewithal to do a barebones Win 7 install from the ground up. But if you’re like me and want one travel notebook and don’t mind not being able to play hardcore 3D games on it, you could do a lot worse in an ultrabook. 802.11n wireless networking performance over a Verizon FiOS router/modem is quite nice and USB 3.0 improved the performance of my main flash drive.
The keyboard is perfect, and Samsung chose to go with a nicely sized Elan multitouch touchpad instead of the clickpad that other ultrabooks and laptops are using to ape Mac products. I like this layout – I never have to worry about resting one thumb on a button and having it impact touchpad use. Two easily-clickable buttons, a well-customizable multitouch touchpad, and a very good keyboard without the quirky sensitivity of the Zenbook means this is probably one of the best typing ultrabooks on the market today. The only drawback: it’s not backlit. I’m a good typist so normal use isn’t an issue, but it’s been a minor fumble to adjust the brightness in the dark.
Appearance: 4 out of 5
Samsung has done a decent job of making a nice, sexy looking laptop. I dock it because the outer materials feel like plastic. I can’t tell if it’s metal with a plastic veneer, but it is definitely not the smooth black metallic surface of the way more expensive Series 9. However, it’s not the chintzy plastic of the Toshiba Z830 or Z835. The surfaces blend well into each other and the front part of the laptop has a curve that lips upward from the bottom part. It had a lot of wow factor when I showed it to my co-workers. Moreover, Samsung proves that it knows people will be using this ultrabook in environments where lights are lit up – no glossy screen here! I could clearly see the display with the sun shining behind me on the train. The 1366×768 resolution display is perfectly fine for 720p HD video, and the integrated graphics would probably have issues with real 1080p content anyway.
Portability: 5 out of 5
Okay, this should be the singular standard by which a current 13.3″ ultrabook is measured. My Asus T101MT convertible netbook was 2.8lbs to the Series 5′s 3.24lbs. The Asus was smaller, leading it to feel denser when it was in my light-load single-strap ergo backpack with my rooted Touchpad, papers, and small load of tech tools. I don’t feel the weight difference since the Series 5′s weight is well distributed for its size. I can carry it in one hand for a decent amount of time while walking around.
Functionality: 4 out of 5
This is a beastly performer of a laptop, I won’t lie. I timed it over three cold boots and it went from no power whatsoever to a usable Windows desktop – services and startup applications launched and running – on an average of 17.375 seconds. This is phenomenal for any machine; I’ve only gotten close to that on my homebuilt PC when it was fresh, and that boots off a Kingston SSD. I’m told – no direct means to confirm yet – that the SSD itself is Samsung components, as is its controller. It loses points, though, for battery life: with wireless on and connected, a hi10p h.264 MKV video playing, 9 Google Chrome tabs open (one of which is Google Docs and the other is a Java IRC session) with the screen at medium brightness, it projects battery life at 100% charge to be 4 hours, 15 minutes. While that’s better than my netbook, which had a lower-voltage processor, I was hoping that throttling down to “Silent mode” would increase battery life. Also, it has noticeable heat on the bottom left hand part of the laptop. It’s not as bad as it could be, but I wish there was more of a spaced-out means of letting the heat venilate. It felt OK on my leg, though, but sitting on a memory-foam sleeve caused it to heat up noticeably.
Software/bloatware: 3 out of 5
There’s a lot of crap on this laptop. If you’re Joe Consumer, it’s safe for you to uninstall Norton Antivirus and use the free, effective Microsoft Security Essentials. If you’re an IT professional, you’re going to tear your hair out over how much…
Read more
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|No real ultrabook – But good built quality with some unique features,
I bought this laptop for my wife at best buy.
She wanted a thin and light laptop preferably with a dvd drive (although personally I think a dvd drive is not really essential anymore these days)
I looked at a lot of “ultrabooks”, including the acer s3, the asus zenbook, and so on.
This Samsung sticks out for 3 reasons:
1. it has a dvd drive
2. its 14 inches instead of 11 or 13,3 inches like most “ultrabooks
3. and most importantly it has a matte screen (more about that later)
While Samsung likes to call this an ultrabook (when you start up the first time, you even get a pop-up with the word Ultrabook and the Intel logo), this laptop does not qualify the Intel standards of an ultrabook. While its light, its heavier then the other ultrabooks (the dvd drive and the 14 inch screen are to blame).
Something what I found very nice is the adapter that comes with the laptop. While they are normally very bulky and heavy, the power adapter is very small (about 1/4 of my Sony Vaio adapter) and light. An extra benefit for when you are carrying this laptop with you.
This laptop comes equipped with a 500gb hard drive and a 16gb ssd from Sandisk for the booting and waking up. This makes that the laptop boots rather fast (20 to 30 seconds) but all other tasks go on normal speed (because of the normal hard drive). The fact that it doesn’t have a full pledge ssd drive has it advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side you have more storage (500 gb), on the min side, its less fast.
The biggest plus and the main reason to choose this “ultrabook” is the fact that it has a matte screen. Samsung seems to be the only laptop manufacturer for the moment that understands the need for this kind of laptop to have a non reflective screen. The whole idea of making laptops more portable is so you can bring them everywhere and use whenever and wherever you want. Now you can also do this in daylight. The viewing angles are also very good.
I did have a problem with the Wifi on this model. This is however not Samsung’s fault but with the intel wireless card. I had to change a setting in my verizon router (disable the qos) for it to make a stable connection with my network (took me a while to figure this out), but luckily there is google and other people with similar problems
overall this is a very good laptop. the build quality is very nice. Its heavier then other ultrabooks. If you want a lighter more portable one, I suggest you look at the 13,3 inch version of this model (you do loose the dvd drive)
One last thing. On the forum here on Amazon there was some confusion about the graphics. Some press releases by Samsung mention that this model comes equipped with a separate graphics card (also mentioned in the Amazon description), this is however not the case. It has the intel shared graphics. Its more then enough for the daily stuff, but you will not be playing the latest games with this machine (the bottleneck for the Windows rating was the graphics, by the way)
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