Samsung RF711 review

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Gallery

Verdict:

A blazingly-fast processor makes the RF711 great for multimedia editing, but the 17.3in screen should have a higher resolution, and its keyboard isn't great

Review Date: 1 May 2011

Price when reviewed: £899

Supplier: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk

Reviewed By: Barry de la Rosa

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Samsung's laptops have always had a refined look, and the RF711 is no exception. The glossy lid has a translucent starburst effect which is eye-catching, and it opens up to a two-tone keyboard panel that reminded us of one of Sony's Vaio designs. A silver panel above and to the right of the keyboard contains the power button as well as a networking toggle button and volume controls. Build quality is good, with little flex in the lid and none in the case.

One of the highlights is the Intel Core i7-2630QM processor, running at 2GHz. That may seem a bit slow, until you consider that the Core i7 supports Turbo Boost, which can automatically overclock the chip to a maximum of 2.9GHz. It's also a quad-core chip and is paired with 6GB of memory, so it's great at multitasking, and its score of 74 overall mean it's quite capable of running most applications, including video-editing and 3D-modelling software.

There's also a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 540M graphics card, which helped the RF711 to a score of 40fps in Call of Duty 4. This is fine but at the screen's native resolution of 1,600x900, the score dropped to 32fps, which is only just playable. Support for CUDA means you'll also benefit from speedier operations in GPU-accelerated applications such as the latest version of Photoshop.

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User comments

Get the Gist when reviewing

I think that Barry has totally missed the USP on the RF711 .
I bought it not because of the resolution which is good enough as anything more would eat in to battery life till 3rd Gen ivybridge comes in.
The usp for me was the dual Drive bays allowing me to get rid of the standard 5400 rpm 750gb drive and have a OCZ Agility 3 SSD as my boot drive and a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB hybrid drive as my storage drive.
Now I have a flying machine in passmarks tests its left everything behind.
However wouldnt have been possible without the Dual drive capability.
Over all its fast in every respect I am going to be running 3D Glassless screens off this and its 2gb video card and Nvidia Cuda support just amazing.
The only gripe I have is that the SSD wasnt accepted straight off took me numerous installs and messing about to do so and Samsung support asked me to change ACHI setting to be changed to manual auto wherea s it needed to be on Auto however having spent a day on it this Laptop is everything I could ask for.
Highly recommended.

By StinovaUK on 29 Jan 2012

More versions

I bought this machine in the sales on the 26/12/11, the cost was a very nice £630!. One of the best purchases I've made to be honest. I'm not sure if the reveiwer was aware that there are a number of different versions of the RF711 for sale, including a version that has the ability to play 'tru 3D' and you can connect a pair of active 3D glasses to. My version was pecular to Curry's, it came with 8 gig of ram, but the hard drive is only 720 gig. As external 1 TB drives are so cheap this is not a problem. It has been superceded by the Samsung 700G7A. One thing that is not mentioned is that my version of the RF711 appears to have two graphics cards running at once, the GeForce and also an Intel HD graphics card. As a result I've found no problems with gaming software.

By RojBlake on 15 Mar 2012

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