Samsung Series 7 Ultra 740U3E review

A glossy black bezel is the only embellishment to the Samsung Series 7 Ultra’s otherwise two-tone aluminium chassis, but it looks great and its rounded corners help it look sleek and stylish. It’s not the thinnest or lightest 13in Ultrabook we’ve seen recently, but at 19mm, it’s still very easy to slot into a bag and its extra heft makes it feel incredibly sturdy and well-made.

We suspect the extra weight has gone into the Series 7 Ultra’s battery, as it has a lot more staying power than its rivals. It lasted an impressive 7h 42m in our light use battery test with the screen set to half brightness, which is nearly two hours more than the Samsung Series 9 900X3D, so you should be able to get a full day’s work out of it before returning it to the mains.

It comes with 6GB of RAM and a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3337U processor, which can Turbo Boost up to 2.7GHz when it’s kept cool enough. It scored a respectable 46 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which is exactly what we’d expect to see from this kind of processor. It may become a little sluggish when it’s multi-tasking, but for the most part it’s certainly fast enough to handle everyday applications as well as those that require multi-threading.

Unusually for an Ultrabook, the Series 7 Ultra also has a dedicated 1GB AMD Radeon HD 8570M graphics chip. It managed a respectable 31.1fps in our Dirt Showdown test on High Quality settings at a 720p resolution. This is excellent for a non-gaming laptop and we only had to drop the settings to Medium and disable anti-aliasing to get a similar frame rate at the screen’s native 1,920×1,080.

It won’t be able to handle really heavy duty games, as we weren’t able to get smooth frame rates in our more demanding Crysis 2 test at 1080p. We had to lower the resolution to 1,280×720 and set the quality to High to get a more playable 26.7fps, so you’ll have to compromise slightly if you want to play the very latest 3D titles.