Samsung RF711 review

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 1,600×900, 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.