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.

Where the Series 7 Ultra really shines, is with its gorgeous 13.3in ten-point touchscreen display. Its glossy finish is a little reflective, but our solid reds, greens and blues really stood out against the screen and packed plenty of punch. Blacks were deep and true and whites were bright and uniformly lit across the screen as well, and this stunning image quality made all the difference in our high contrast image tests. We were able to see a high level of detail in both the light and dark areas of each photo and colours remained rich and vibrant throughout. Its viewing angles were similarly superb as we were able to see the screen clearly from a variety of angles without any noticeable shift in contrast across the screen.

The Series 7 Ultra’s keyboard was another highlight. Its springy Chiclet-style keys were sensibly laid out and gave plenty of tactile feedback. A row of media buttons double up on the function keys, and we were able to type at full speed in no time.

We liked its large all-in-one touchpad, too. We feared its central location on the wrist rest might get in the way of our hands while we were typing, but we never caught it with the edge of our palms and its responsive surface was very easy to use. We had no problem executing Windows 8 shortcuts and multi-touch gestures worked every time. Navigating the desktop was easy as well. The lower part of the touchpad had lots of click despite its lack of individual buttons and it was very accurate and responsive when we moved our cursor round the screen, even when we had more than more finger resting on the touchpad.

The Series 7 Ultra has a good range of ports. We usually expect ultra-portables like this to be quite sparing on connections so they can keep their chassis as thin as possible, but the Series 7 Ultra has more than most. Admittedly, we were a little disappointed that only one of its three USB ports supported the faster USB3 type, but there’s also an HDMI output for connecting it up to an external display, a proprietary output that can be used with the optional VGA adaptor, an SD card reader, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a combined headphone and microphone jack. Its integrated JBL speakers are some of the best laptop speakers we’ve heard, with plenty of bass and full, rich sounds, so you shouldn’t need to plug in a pair of headphones while listening to music.

The Samsung Series 7 Ultra is a stunning laptop and you get a lot for your money. If you want an all-round, this is the model to buy, but if you want more battery life and something lighter, go for the 13-inch Macbook Air.