Samsung Series 5 NP530U4B-A01US 14-Inch Ultrabook (Silver)

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 internal hard drive. Never again will I have to be worried about a full hard drive.

Size and Weight/Aesthetics/Price
This is an ultrabook. Make no mistakes. It is thin, lightweight, looks like a real charmer, and costs about what you’d expect for an ultrabook. Actually, comparing to other machines, I’d say that for an ultrabook this is reasonably priced. Yes, it has a 14 inch screen. Yes, it’s a little bit thicker than other ultrabooks on the market. Yes, it’s a touch heavier than other ultrabooks on the market. But there’s a trade-off between the ultimate thin and light machine and an overall robust machine. You get a heavier machine with the larger screen, with the hard drive, with the DVD drive. Would I rather skip those items to get a slightly lighter machine? No. This model is already very portable.

Summary Positive/Negatives
All in all, it’s a really good machine. I had to do some configuration work out of the box. Aside from that and overall, some pretty minor complaints, this is a real gem.

Positives:
- Thin, light, portable
- 500gb hard drive
- FAST
- Great cooling system
- Nice 14 inch display with a matte finish
- overall comfortable keyboard, minimal flex

Negatives:
-Keyboard is not backlight
-Needed to make minor adjustments to trackpad settings out of the box

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)

I did a lot of kicking around for a lot of the so-called ultrabooks. I know…some wouldn’t consider this an ultrabook, but nevermind that. What I wanted was a lightweight laptop with a good battery life. I chose the Samsung Series 5 Ultra because it offered all of that, and still gave me a decent sized hard drive (I got the version with the 500Gig). Peformance wise, the SSD cache drive really makes a major impact over a traditional hard drive. You won’t notice it initially…but after using it for a few days, the system seems to cache out the files I use the most and it really makes an impact on load times for your favorite apps (email, twitter, web browser, Lightroom, etc). Of course at a later date, i can always upgrade the hard drive (confirmed by Samsung) when the SSD drives are more economical and a bit larger. But that’s neither here nor there.

I really like the keyboard. Coming from a more traditional laptop keyboard, the island design and the short travel of the keys took some getting used to. But it has a better more tactile feel than I’m used to, and it’s really accurate. I type really fast and have no experienced any problems with the keyboard. My only complaint about the keyboard is that I wish I had dedicated page up, page down, home and end buttons (you have to do a key-combination with the ‘Fn’ button). albeit, there’s not a lot of real-estate for such keys…but even so. I also wish the wifi button was mapped to just turn the wifi off/on…instead it pulls up the configuration manager, so that’s an extra step.

The track pad is a really good quality track pad. It suppors multi-touch, and so things like zooming and scrolling are very easy (two finger slide down to scroll, pinch to zoom, etc). It’s also very large with makes for easy use. However, it does take some getting used to. The upper edge is very close to the keys, and so I find myself lazily resting one of my fingers on the upper-right corner of the pad, which means when I’m trying to move with my other finger, I’m actually pinch-zooming, which is kinda annoying. But that’s habitual and nothing necessarily wrong with the laptop. Besides, I shouldn’t be resting my hands on the laptop in that way anyhow (bad posture). EDIT: One minor annoyance…if you start typing, or if you are holding a keyboard button, the trackpad locks up. I believe this is by design to prevent palm clicks or redirects, but there doesn’t seem to be an option to change this behavior. Fro my needs, it’s fine. But when it comes to gaming, this would limit the playability factor.

Let’s talk battery life. By default, many of the battery saving settings are not enabled. So the first few days I thought the battery was mediocre…3-4 hours at best, and I was somewhat disappointed (and besides, I admit I never read the manual at the time). Then I discovered all of the battery saving features such as the power profiles (learn these, tweak these and use them) and some of the other tweaks. Now I’m getting 6 hours of battery life consistently. A bonus feature that I appreciate is that you can enable an option that preserves the longevity of the battery. It prevents the charger from charging the battery past 80%. Sure, you lose some battery time o the short term, but such a charging technique has been proven to increase the overall life of the battery. So I enable it, and I recommend that you should too. Side note about the charger – it’s small, very small. More than half the size of my old laptops “brick”. Bonus.

Overall, it’s a great laptop and I would recommend it to anyone. It has a few shortcomings for those of you who need a bit more performance, but this laptop (nor any of the ultrabooks) is designed for super high-performance. But I do really push this guy beyond limits. I use Photoshop and Photoshop lightroom regularly, I do play my fair share of games. And I love it.

The bottom of the laptop gets extremely hot (avg. CPU temp of 60C) and the fan makes a rumbling sound. I have only had it for 2 months and these problems are now occurring. I did upgrade to a SSD and the experience was painless. Be aware SSDs come in different thicknesses. This computer requires the slimmer SSD (7.5mm I believe). I am using the Samsung 128GB SSD for sale on Amazon.

I just started to do my research about how to replace the fan on this laptop, but I decided to drop in here to write a review about it. Beware this laptop gets very, very hot and has a bad fan. Otherwise, it was exactly what I was looking for – small, light, attractive, and powerful.

EDIT 4/25/12: I had to send it back to Samsung… the fan sounded like it was dying, and the temps were getting way too high (saw 75 degrees at one point). They replaced the mainboard, processor, and fan and mailed it back to me yesterday. The warranty process was fairly painless except being without my computer for 1 week.

EDIT 4/27/12: Got it back. Still seeing >70C CPU temps, although the noisy fan issue has been solved. I guess I’m going to have to invest in a CPU cooling pad.

To me, the typical Ultrabook configuration is all about “form before function.” I was honestly tempted to get the HP Folio in all it’s thin/lightweight glory. But I kept coming back to…”Gee, I’m gonna have to buy an external drive no matter what, because after you install all the applications you want, you’re left with about 70 gb.” Now who are we trying to kid? With that kind of space, what the beloved Ultrabook becomes is nothing more than a tablet with a keyboard attached.

Think about it. 70gb is about how much space you would have gotten in 1999. If you want to be in lockstep with Ultrabook cult, you’re going backwards, not forward.

If you want to do serious work or play…you need a big hard drive. And I found myself asking, why would I want to lug around an external drive, when I could get single biggest benefit of Ultrabook by getting the Samsung Series 5? The benefit? Fast boot!

So let me know tell you that, I’ve had this laptop for 24 hours and I think it’s great. It’s lighter, thinner and boots faster than probably any laptop that has a cd-rom and 500 gb hard drive. Plus, it is super fast. Why would anyone sacrifice this just to have look good at Starbucks? No…if you want a real Windows 7 laptop that, along with the main advantages of an Ultrabook…go with this. Don’t buy into the idea that you will be happier and more productive with a standard Ultrabook configuration. It’s eye candy and nothing more.

This…Samsung, I am happy and productive with.

UPDATE: 4/24/2012

I am happy and productive. Today is Day 5. After syncing my most important folders using Dropbox and Microsoft Mesh, along with installing essential programs, I’ve already used about 150 GB. Without the 500 GB hard drive, this would have been nothing more than a causal computer for lightweight use. Keep in mind that for an Ultrabook, you’re spending considerably more than what is typically these days for a laptop. Yes you can do cloud drive thing and external hard drive thing — and I considered all those options. Ultimately, that extra hassle defeats the purpose of an Ultrabook. And you’re spending more for less functionality. As much as Samsung has been slammed by reviewers for going down the path of including a decent sized hard drive + optical drive…I commend them for thinking it through and giving people what the need on a practical level.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of having the standard ultrabook config as a secondary computer…but I’d probably treat it the same way that I would a tablet. It’s for light on-the-go use, i.e. emails, docs, etc.

UPDATE 4/27/2012

I’ve now had it over a week and I continue to be very pleased with this buying decision. Now let me give you my impressions in-depth:

WHAT I LIKE:

FAST BOOT: I have three relatively new laptops. The Samsung is now #4. When using laptops, I’d always keep them turned out and set the power settings so that they never turn of when plugged in. That’s because I don’t like waiting for boot-up. Plus, restarting from stand-by also takes an intolerably long time. Now for the first time with this Samsung — I sit down in front of it and start working on it almost immediately from a boot from standby — and within 15 to 20 seconds on a cold boot. Now…it gives that same kind of user experience that people experience on other instant-on devices such as smart phones and tablets.

BIG STORAGE: As I’ve said previously, if you’re looking for a computer that you’re planning to do serious work on, my opinion is that you can’t depend on an SSD with only 128 GB, unless you’re willing to hassle with a external drive or cloud. Fine — if you’re just sending emails or doing using Word. But…you can do that on a table or smart phone. So one week downstream with this laptop, I haven’t needed to think twice about what I install or what data I transfer over. And I still have plenty of room left.

GREAT KEYBOARD: Others have praised the keyboard. They are right. It’s precisely calibrated and engineered and it feels as comfortable and natural as my favorite dedicated keyboard, the Microsoft Curve.

COOL VENTILATION: Some reviews have complained about overheating issues. I have not detected any hint of that. If anything, the top surface of the where my palms rest while typing remains pretty cool and I have not detected any hotspots on any areas of the unit.

MISCELLANEOUS: Great sound. Nice metal mental slab. Wonderful bright display. Matte finish, minimizing reflection. Excellent ports, including VGA fr multiple monitors and Ethernet.

WHAT I’M IFFY ABOUT:

FUNCTION KEYS: Like many laptops, there are function keys at the top where allow you to adjust brightness, volume level, etc. I just wish there was a way to default to touchpad to off. As it stands, every time I reboot, I have to remember to turn it off.

CD-ROM DRIVE: I’m kind of indifferent as to whether it’s there. Right now I think it just ads weight and thickness. At the same time, I know that it’s handy to have around if I every have to go into Windows 7 recovery mode.

SHARP EDGE RIGHT ABOUT MY WRIST AREA: This is going to sound picky, but I realize that Samsung designed this unit to appear as thin as possible. In the process the edge right below the touchpad is rather on the shape side. If you rest palms and your wrists, you’ll get an unpleasant dig into your wrists. Very, very minor picky point.

BATTERY CHARGE: I’m estimating that I’m getting about 5 to 6 hours per charge. But I’m definitely not optimizing because I want me screen to be on the brightest setting. This is the one area in which Samsung should have done better on. Because the battery is inaccessible, I can’t cold/hard swap in fully charged battery. Therefore, I wish they’d given us a 6 cell battery (like what the HP Folio got) instead of a 4 cell.

Overall, this is the best laptop I’ve every purchased. And after a week’s use…I’m continue to be as happy as I can possibly be with it.

UPDATE 5/21/2012

Still going strong. This form factor is just so conducive for working around the house…on the sofa, dining room table, or in bed. It’s really made me more productive, especially over the weekend, when I don’t want to sit behind a desk.

BTW…

I’ve looked at many reviews of different Ultrabooks that are now being released. If you’ve heard about the new AMD chipped ones coming out from HP, they have the conventional 500gb hard drives available in addition to the SSD drives for fast boot. To me, that really affirms that, there’s many peole out there who don’t want to hassel with an external drive.

I’m still very happy with this notebook. The finish is very good, the design clean and it’s fast. I installed Ubuntu on the SSD-drive and this way benefit from a quite fast system with a big storage (home-partition on platter-drive) for a very fair price.
The two small things to mention are the keyboard that leaves slight marks on the screen if carried closed (make sure there’s always a cloth or foil when closed) and the thin pin of the power plug appear to be in danger of bending or even breaking (not yet happened).