MyProffs

Samsung has pulled the covers off its take on the Ultrabook at CES, like a perfectly decent laptop, it's not exactly a super-portable.

The Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook will come in two sizes, 13- or 14-inches, and offer you a light and compact notebook. The Samsung Series 5 Ultrabooks were released in Korea in December 2011 and now make their way to the UK and will cost you £799.

The Engine Room

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The 14-inch Series 5 packs in a dedicated AMD Radeon HD7550M GPU. Both machines come with 4GB RAM as standard, there’s the option to upgrade to 8GB for a bit of extra future proofing.

Gaming aside, the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 chip is pretty good but don’t expect any hard gaming on the Series 5.

Samsung has taken the middle ground on equipping the Series 5, opting for an Intel Core i5-2467M (1.6GHz) CPU, 4GB RAM and a 1366 x 768 screen resolution. The processor is part of the Sandy Bridge family (a prerequisite for Ultrabook-class) and so the graphics memory is built into the CPU core.

The Display

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The screen on both 13- and 14-inch models is LED, and is nice and bright. The 13-inch is, obviously, the more portable of the two, weighing in at 1.38kg (should you opt for SSD), with the 13.3-inch anti-reflective display offering a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, and a brightness of 300nit.

The 14-inch model on the other hand will be a little heavier at 1.84kg, but you do get the AMD Radeon HD7550M 1GB GPU to power the visuals.

There is also space to cram in an optical drive, making this a veritable mobile powerhouse. Both will offer you a 16GB iSSD with ExpressCache to ensure fast starting and launching of apps, as we've seen on previous Samsung notebooks.

The Design

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The Series 5 is sturdy enough -- the body feels metallic and well screwed together. There's room for a full-sized keyboard, which felt good to type on in the short time we had to try it out, and the trackpad is pleasingly large.

The Series 5 is abut 18mm thick and weighs 1.43kg. It's by no means a monster, but with the laptop youwill make a lot of sacrifices, such as the lack of optical drive and ports.

The 300nit HD LED SuperBright screen is lovely and bright and is anti-glare and 13-inch. It's between 14 to 17.6mm thick and weighs a measly 1.38kg – a fairly standard Ultrabook weight.

Storage

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The Series 5 doesn't have a solid-state drive. The one we saw used a normal, 500GB hard disk instead. On the plus side, that means you get more storage than models with SSDs. On the other hand, it adds thickness to the laptop, which slightly defeats the point of the ultrabook in the first place, and it's more susceptible to damage if you drop it.

Samsung says the 14-inch can be configured with up to 1TB of storage – an incredible amount. In aditional, this creates a problem – SSD storage is fast. So the Series 5 includes a tech to boost the speed of the standard drive - ExpressCache by Diskeeper.

This uses a small 16GB iSSD to speed up the system. Samsung cites a 20 second boot time and 2 second resume from standby, which is only a little slower than many other Ultrabooks featuring SSDs.

Connectivity

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There's no optical drive as the laptop isn't big enough to hold one, and it's not exactly awash with ports for the same reason.

You get two USB 2.0 ports on the right, together with a 4-in-1 memory card reader. On the left is a USB 3.0 port, which we were pleased to see, an HDMI port, which made us smile some more, and an Ethernet port, which caused us to scratch our heads as it looked broken.

Samsung has added a little flap that opens up when you plug the cable in, making the opening a bit wider. It looks a little untidy, but it's better than being forced to use a breakout cable.

The 13" model also has a full-size HDMI port along with one USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, a 4-in-1 multi SD card slot, an Ethernet connection and webcam.

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