Samsung Series 3 NP355V5C review

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.