Samsung Series 3 NP355V5C review

We’ve seen Series 3 laptops before, but only with Intel hardware inside. The NP355V5C is the first one with AMD components, and Samsung seems to have chosen wisely. The A10-4600M is currently AMD’s most powerful Trinity mobile APU, and it’s been paired with dedicated graphics for both desktop and 3D performance.

From the outside, there’s little difference between this Samsung Series 3 and others we’ve seen before. The silver metallic finish looks sleek, even if the plastic construction isn’t particularly luxurious. It weighs 2.5kg and is 30mm thick, so it’s about average for a 15in laptop and you’ll be able to carry it without too much strain.

At the sides, you get two USB ports, two faster USB3 ports, HDMI and VGA video outputs, twin 3.5mm audio jacks, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a DVD re-writer. There’s also a multiformat card reader at the front, too. This laptop gives you plenty of connectivity.

Samsung has managed to squeeze in a numeric keypad by shrinking the keys slightly, but the QWERTY keys are full size, which meant we didn’t find typing too troublesome. The keys themselves are springy with plenty of travel, which should suit most people, and we can’t bemoan the lack of a keyboard backlight considering the price of the laptop.

The spacious touchpad is a great match for the 15.6in display. It uses the same aspect ratio and is made from smooth plastic that lets your fingers glide across its surface. There’s more than enough room to cover the entire desktop in one swipe, and multitouch gestures were always recognised accurately. The touchpad buttons beneath it are chunky and responsive, making audible clicks each time you push one in so you’re always sure they have registered.

Samsung has fitted a pair of stereo speakers above the keyboard tray, but they’re best described as functional. The mid-range is clear, but the high-end sounds sharp and there isn’t much bass, and we still recommend headphones for anything more involving than the average YouTube video.

Turning our attention to the display, we weren’t surprised to see a 1,366×768 resolution, but we’re pleased Samsung has given it a semi-gloss finish. It helps diffuse light reflections without removing colour vibrancy, so we could work in most lighting conditions without complaint. There’s plenty of screen tilt, but the limited viewing angles that come with the TN panel are all too familiar. Thankfully, the screen has a reasonably bright LED backlight that doesn’t bleed into dark images. Colours look vivid and the contrast ratio is about average, although there’s a slight loss of detail when watching very dark film scenes.

Internally, the AMD A10-4600M processor is the centrepiece. It’s a quad-core chip running at 2.3GHz, but it can also use Turbo Core to reach 3.2GHz in certain applications. Paired with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk, it ploughed through our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 46. This is a disappointingly slow result, especially compared to Intel’s low-voltage dual-core chips currently being used in Ultrabooks, but in real-world tests we were never left waiting for programs to load and couldn’t spot any noticeable slowdown when web browsing or typing documents.

Its desktop performance might not be especially fast, but its graphics performance is fantastic given the budget nature of the system. As well as having the internal graphics of the A10 processor, Samsung has also installed a dedicated Radeon HD 7670M GPU for extra grunt. The pair work together in Crossfire mode, so it should come as no surprise that it stormed through our Dirt 3 test. The average frame rate of 49.3 is easily playable, and only just short of the magic 60fps that marks how fast the display is able to refresh itself. With a few tweaks to anti-aliasing and level of detail, we managed to boost the frame rate by another 10-20%, so you should have no trouble playing modern games at medium detail settings.

Despite its quad-core processor and dedicated graphics, the Series 3 still managed an impressive average battery life of six hours. Our light-use test is a fair representation of what to expect when word processing or web browsing, so if you stick to light tasks you’ll be able to squeeze the most from the battery.

Unless you’re willing to spend upwards of £1,000 on a laptop with powerful graphics, there aren’t many that will happily play the latest games. AMD’s hybrid Crossfire setup is the best value way to get playable frame rates, even if it means desktop performance isn’t quite on par with the Intel alternative.

This fact aside, the Samsung Series 3 is still a fantastic mid-range laptop. Its screen might not blow you away and it’s a little on the chunky side, but the price is right and it looks great too. If you’ll be spending more time working than playing, or plan on taking your laptop with you on the move, there are similarly priced alternatives such as the Acer Timeline Ultra M3. However, gamers on a budget should definitely consider the Samsung.