Samsung Series 7 Chronos review

In a market dominated by Ultrabooks and stick-thin hybrids, Samsung’s Series 7 Chronos gleefully bucks the trend. With a powerful quad-core processor and high-powered AMD graphics chipset crammed into a stylish metal chassis, it’s no average desktop replacement – Samsung is gunning for the likes of Apple’s MacBook Pro.

The latest Chronos is an update to last year’s machine, and although Samsung hasn’t tweaked the design, it’s still lovely to look at. It’s built almost exclusively from brushed aluminium, and the understated, elegant design is dotted with pleasing touches. The Scrabble-tile keyboard is inset slightly into the brushed metal keyboard surround; the trackpad is a featureless slab of silky smooth metal; and only a couple of unobtrusive logos and tiny status lights disturb the minimalist metal design.

Attractive looks go hand-in-hand with sterling build quality. There’s hardly any give in the wrist rest or the base, and the touchscreen and lid feel reassuringly solid. To be fair, it’s what we’d expect, given the Samsung’s bulk: at 2.5kg, it’s half a kilo heavier than the latest MacBook Pro, and its 30mm girth – including rubber feet – is substantially thicker than the A-Listed Apple’s 18mm body.

Sit down with the Series 7 Chronos, however, and it’s a pleasure to use from the off. The keyboard is superb: the base is solid and, while there’s not much travel in the keys, their action is comfortable and consistent. It’s backlit, too, with a light sensor beside the webcam fading the lights up and down, and there’s room for full-sized keys and a number pad. The touchpad is similarly impressive, due to its responsive surface and full support for Windows 8’s touchscreen gestures, and it depresses with a light, crisp click.

Up front, Samsung’s equipped the Series 7 Chronos with a 15.6in, Full HD touchscreen. The touchscreen itself supports 10-point multitouch, and the smooth, glossy surface responds accurately to the lightest of touches. Thanks to the relatively wide bezels either side of the screen, Windows 8’s edge-swipe gestures work well, too.

Image quality is well up to par. Unlike many touchscreens we’ve seen, there’s no hint of graininess to the panel coating, and wide viewing angles are matched with excellent colour accuracy. Put to the test with our X-Rite colorimeter, the Samsung’s panel managed an average Delta E of only 2.5 – not far off the 1.5 scored by the more expensive MacBook Pro 17in. The LED backlighting reaches a modest maximum brightness of 254cd/m[sup]2[/sup], but the contrast ratio of 806:1 makes for punchy, solid-looking images. It’s one of the better screens we’ve seen on a laptop, but if you’re hoping for Retina-beating clarity or colour accuracy, you’ll be disappointed: the MacBook Pro’s display is brighter, its colours are more accurate, and its Retina resolution of 2,880 x 1,800 makes it sharper still.

The Chronos’ sizable chassis is chock-full of powerful components. The 2.4GHz Core i7-3635QM is a quad-core Ivy Bridge processor, and as it’s able to use Turbo to hit a top speed of 3.4GHz, it racked up a speedy 0.9 in our Real World Benchmarks – only a sliver behind the 0.92 scored by the MacBook Pro.

Graphics power comes from a Radeon HD 8870M – one of the beefiest mobile GPUs that AMD produces. It whizzed through our 1,920 x 1,080 High-quality Crysis test at 38fps – six frames more than the MacBook. If you’re seeking a laptop that can smash through the latest games, the Series 7 Chronos is more than capable.

Such reserves of power would ordinarily leave a laptop limping home in the battery-life stakes, but it’s simply not the case here: the Samsung’s huge, eight-cell battery lasted for 8hrs 36mins in our light-use battery benchmark.

Amazingly, heat isn’t an issue either: the touchscreen and wrist rest both stayed at comfortable temperatures when we stress-tested the Chronos, and the processor’s peak temperature of 82°C isn’t high enough for us to worry. It’s a better showing than the MacBook, which hit a top temperature of 54°C along the keyboard’s top edge and was noticeably toasty elsewhere. The Samsung’s fans also remained virtually silent, even during the toughest benchmarks.

The rest of the Samsung’s specification is standard fare. There’s 8GB of RAM, and Samsung’s saved a little cash by opting for a 1TB hard disk rather than a high-speed SSD. There’s no lack of connectivity, however. Gigabit Ethernet is a welcome sight, as are the D-SUB and HDMI outputs, and there are two USB 3 ports and two USB 2 ports. With dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4 thrown in for good measure, there’s nothing missing.

Samsung’s put together a cracking desktop replacement in the Series 7 Chronos. If you can find an extra £400 in your budget, there’s no question that Apple’s Macbook Pro with Retina display is the classier all-round package, but the Samsung still has plenty going for it. It, too, blends power with an attractive design. Considering the superb Full HD touchscreen, it’s the most refined Windows 8 desktop replacement we’ve seen so far in 2013.

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