Samsung Series 7 Chronos review - Hands on

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Posted on 10 Jan 2013 at 02:17, by Tom Morgan

Samsung has confirmed the existence of two new laptops ahead of its CES press conference next week - the Series 7 Chronos and Series 7 Ultra. The former is an update to Samsung's existing Series 7 Chronos desktop replacement and the latter is an ultra-thin, all aluminium Ultrabook with a Full HD display.

Powered by a quad-core Intel Core i7-3635QM CPU running at 2.4GHz, with up to 16GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 8870M GPU, the Series 7 Chronos should be more than powerful enough to run today's latest games at high detail settings. Paired with the 1,920x1,080 resolution 15.6in display, you'll also be able to watch Full HD videos - either streamed from the web or from the 1TB internal hard disk. Weighing 2.3kg and with a battery that Samsung claims will last up to 11 hours on a single charge, it could strike a fine balance between power and portability when it launches next year.

We had high expectations for the Chronos, and Samsung didn't let us down. Build quality was up to the standard we know expect for high-end Samsung laptops, being sleeker than anything similarly powerful yet feeling very sturdy at the same time - just like a MacBook.

The keyboard doesn't have a lot of travel but it's incredibly positive and responsive all the same and we took to it straight away. The screen's Full HD resolution looks stunning plus there's 300nits of brightness.

Plenty of ports, including full-sized VGA, though we can't see it getting much use

We've not seen the AMD Radeon 8870M grpahics chipset before and Samsung weren't kind enough to provide any full on 3D games on the stand sample. Without benchmarks it's hard to comment, but the signs looked good at the launch, as you can read here: AMD 8000M mobile graphics announced.

Alongside it, the thinner and lighter Series 7 Ultra is aimed at those looking for a more mobile machine, but still want to be able to play games when on the move. For full details check out our Samsung Series 7 Ultra - Hands on