Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra review: Premium performance at a high price

The sort of people who are looking to spend around £3,000 on a laptop tend to do so for one of two reasons. They need a laptop for heavy-duty creative work such as video editing and so buy an Apple MacBook Pro. Or they’re seeking a portable gaming powerhouse, in which case they will be looking at something with the words Alienware or Asus ROG written on the lid.

Laptops like this new Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra and the Dell XPS 16 offer the possibility of getting the best of both worlds: a laptop with the power, portability and display quality to meet the MacBook Pro head-on, yet with the capabilities to also play the latest PC games. Is that even possible? And assuming it is, which should you buy?

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra review: What you need to know

On paper, at least, the Galaxy Book4 Ultra should have that All Things To All Users brief well-handled thanks to its spacious 16in, 16:10, 120Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 AMOLED touch display, potent Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU and Nvidia RTX 4070 discrete GPU with a healthy 100W TGP.

That said, CPU aside, the same thing could be said about the Galaxy Book3 Ultra. Given that a fully-loaded Galaxy Book4 Ultra will set you back north of £3,000 it’s a slight worry that Samsung seems to be asking top dollar for a re-heat rather than an all-new machine.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra: Price and competition

Configuration tested:  Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 185H CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 16in, 120Hz 2,880 x 1,800 AMOLED touch display. Price when reviewed: £3,149

Cheap is not a word you can use about the Galaxy Book4 Ultra. Our fully-loaded model will set you back £3,149. If that’s too rich for your blood then there is a cheaper option running on an Intel Core Ultra 155H CPU with an RTX 4050 GPU and with 16GB of RAM, which will set you back £2,649. The main competition offers a wider choice of specifications and prices.

• The Dell XPS 16 is powerful, super-stylish and comes with a 4K, albeit 90Hz, Samsung-made OLED screen. It’s also available in a range of specifications ranging from £1,649 to £3,908. It’s a firm favourite here at Expert Reviews.
• The Apple MacBook Pro is a doyen of creative laptops with a dazzlingly bright Mini LED display and in M3 Max form, blinding performance. Battery life leaves the Windows machines coughing in its dust. Prices range from £2,599 to £3,599 for the 16in model, which is good value considering what you are getting.
• The Asus Vivobook 16X has a lot to offer If you want a quality creative laptop without the withering price tag. The RTX 4060 model can be yours for less than £1,199 and you get a 120Hz display in a MIL-STD-810H-tough package.
• The Asus Zenbook S16 is also worth a look if you don’t really need the ultimate graphics performance from a discrete GPU. Epic battery life, towering CPU performance and a truly superb OLED screen are the hallmarks of this exceptional, and quite beautiful, laptop. It’s great value at £1,600.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra: Design and build quality

Samsung has joined Acer as one of the manufacturers about whose laptop design it’s nigh on impossible to get excited about. Neither seems willing or able to match the likes of Dell, Apple and Asus, who are all making devices with genuine design merit.

The 2024 Ultra looks very similar – without having the two side-by-side I won’t actually use the word “identical” – to the previous model. The aluminium casing is solid and the Moonstone Grey matte finish is both smart and impervious to fingerprints. As an example of product design, however, it’s no more remarkable than the average kitchen appliance.

When it comes to practical matters the Ultra does rather better. At 1.63kg it’s reasonably light for a 16in laptop and it’s not too bulky either at 355 x 250 x 16.5mm. The Dell XPS 16 is heavier and thicker.

There’s a decent range of I/O ports here with a brace of Thunderbolt 4 ports and an HMDI 2.1 video output on the left. Plus, on the right, a 5Gbits/sec USB-A port, MicroSD card slot and 3.5mm audio jack. Of course, you have to surrender one of the USB-C ports to charging duties with the included 140W charger.

Incidentally, the MicroSD slot is a bit of a pain to use because the spring latch is set too deep, necessitating the use of a sharp tool to get it out. Unless you happen to have long fingernails, that is.

Wireless communications are handled by the ever-reliable Intel AX211 card, which supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 rather than the very latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 protocols.

Getting inside the Ultra involves prising off the four rubber feet, undoing the Torx screws they conceal and then getting brave with a spudger to loosen the plastic clips that hold the base plate very firmly in situ. All the major components and the RAM modules are soldered in place but there is a bay for a second M.2 2280 SSD, assuming you’ve bought a 1TB model.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

I liked the feeling of solidity from the keyboard deck but the keys themselves don’t have a particularly satisfying action to them, feeling rather shallow and loose. Alongside this, the cursor keys are half-height efforts, which is a damned shame when there is masses of free space around them for a larger set of keys.

As one would expect from a 16in laptop there’s plenty of room for a number pad to the right of the keyboard and the keys that make it up are only fractionally narrower than those that make up the main keyboard. The keycap graphics are very clear, the three-stage white backlight works a treat and there’s a keyboard Fn lock.

There’s a fingerprint reader in the very top right corner, and slightly offset to the left on the deck below the keyboard you’ll find a whopper of a touchpad measuring a huge 150 x 106mm. The touchpad suffered none of the problems we found in the Galaxy Book3 Ultra. Here, it performed perfectly and the mechanical click action is quiet enough to prevent scowls in a library.

The 1080p (2MP) webcam won’t blow anyone’s socks off, however, with images appearing rather grainy in anything other than perfect light. The camera doesn’t have a privacy shutter, either, nor does it support Windows Hello facial recognition although you do get the full suite of Windows Studio Effects. All in all, it feels like rather thin gruel for a laptop this pricey.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra: Display and audio

Buying a Samsung laptop with an OLED display is as close to a guarantee of a high-quality panel you can get, and the Ultra proved no exception to this rule. Its 16in 2,880 x 1,800 120Hz AMOLED 2X panel is a feast for the eyes and for the 2024 season Ultra comes with an added touch compatibility.

With Windows in SDR mode, peak brightness reaches a respectable 376cd/m2, but in HDR it jumps to 567cd/m2, more than enough to earn the Ultra its VESA DisplayHDR 500 True Black certification. There’s no lack of colour either – it’s capable of reproducing an impressive 115% of the DCI-P3 gamut – and the screen has four pre-calibrated colour profile settings to choose from: Vivid, sRGB, DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB.

Measured against the last three, the Delta E variance landed at 1.6, 1.2 and 1.6, respectively for each of these profiles, which is a fair rather than an exceptional level of accuracy for a machine aimed at serious creatives. More to the point, the results aren’t as good as the Galaxy Book3 Ultra which scored less than 1 against all profiles.

Colorimeter data aside, the Galaxy Book4’s screen does look superb in both SDR and HDR modes with limpid, saturated colours and the perfect contrast ratio — both enhanced by the high-gloss screen finish — that only OLED screens can deliver. The 120Hz refresh rate means motion handling is equally good, with very little ghosting or blurring and there’s a 60/120Hz dynamic switch to prevent undue battery drain.

Equally good is the laptop’s Dolby Atmos-enabled AKG quad speaker system. This comprises a pair of 5W woofers and 2W full-range drivers and delivers a deep, sonorous sound. It’s loud, too, generating 77.5dBA measured from a pink noise source at 1m.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra: Performance and battery life

Thanks to its Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and 100W TGP Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU the Ultra is a nippy performer. In our standard 4K multimedia benchmark it scored an impressive 463 points, just beating the Dell XPS 16 and easily securing a place in the top 5% of laptops we’ve tested here at Expert Reviews.

The Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 14,266 can’t match the Asus Zenbook S16’s 16,390 but it still means the Ultra has ample processing power and thanks to its 16-core, 22-thread design it can do many things, quickly, at once.

In the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test the Ultra topped 95fps and it chewed through the Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal gaming benchmarks at 77fps and 88fps respectively at Full HD, high detail settings without Ray Tracing enabled. If you swap out the Nvidia Studio drivers the Ultra ships with gaming drivers you may notice an increase in game performance.

Fan noise is never an issue with the Ultra; even when running flat-out the sound they make is subdued and entirely tolerable. In Performance mode, a bit more noise wouldn’t go amiss, though. Under stress testing, while the Nvidia GPU happily chugged along at 95% utilisation or more, the CPU dropped to just under 60%, indicating some throttling was afoot.

I was happy with the speed of the – Samsung-made, naturally – SSD which demonstrated average sequential read and write speeds of 5,331MB/sec and 3,995MB/sec respectively. The Dell XPS 16 did better but this sort of performance is still more than fast enough for a laptop destined to spend much of its life shunting large files around. The memory card reader reached 89MB/sec for sequential file reads, which is a pretty mediocre result.

In our usual video rundown test using VLC, the new Ultra lasted 9hrs 12mins. That’s a decent showing by x86 Meteor Lake standards, but only a quarter of an hour better than the Galaxy Book3 Ultra.

The new crop of Windows-on-ARM laptops and the latest generation of machines using Intel’s latest Core Ultra Lunar Lake or AMD’s Zen 5 chips are rather rewriting the rules on what is considered a good battery life, so if that’s a priority, you may want to wait until the Galaxy Book5 Ultra appears.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra: Verdict

I came away from the Galaxy Book4 Ultra feeling it was less than the sum of its parts. Granted it’s a potent beast but it’s also not much more than a warm-over of the Galaxy Book3 Ultra. I’m also struggling to convince myself that it’s good enough for the asking price when you can have a Dell XPS 16 or a MacBook Pro for roughly the same, or the likes of the awesome Asus Zenbook S16 for a lot less.

For the sort of money Samsung is asking for the Galaxy Book4 Ultra I’d want a better keyboard, a better webcam and a laptop that looks like it wasn’t styled by the same person who designed my microwave or fridge-freezer. Until Samsung ticks those boxes I’ll be recommending the Dell XPS 16 to anyone who wants a laptop for professional creative work and a little surreptitious gaming on the side.