Samsung Series 7 NP700Z7C Review
by Jarred Walton on August 16, 2012 2:05 AM ESTSamsung Series 7 Gaming Performance
There’s no craziness this time with CPU/GPU throttling under typical gaming workloads, but we did run into some driver anomalies. Samsung ships the Series 7 with a rather old 296.87 driver version, and while performance in most games is fine, Civilization V in particular has very poor performance. Unfortunately, the only other drivers that will properly install right now are the 304.79 beta drivers, and those don’t bring Civ5 performance back to the level that we saw with the Clevo W110ER. Other than that one title, performance in the other games was pretty close between the two drivers, so we’ve used the 296.87 scores for the remaining titles.
Value Gaming Performance
As we’ve seen with quite a few laptops, the launch of Kepler GPUs has made our Value settings less of a struggle. Outside of the Civ5 issue, Samsung’s Series 7 is able to pass 60FPS in all of the titles, though it’s interesting that the Clevo W110ER still takes a few wins—again, most likely thanks to using different drivers. As a higher end “mainstream” notebook, we’d be more surprised if there were problems with our Value settings, so let’s just move along and bump up the difficulty a notch.
Mainstream Gaming Performance
Again with the exception of Civ5 (look at the W110ER to get a rough idea of where the Samsung should be performing), Samsung takes down all of our mainstream gaming tests without any difficulties to speak of. Battlefield 3 is the only game where you might see occasional sub-30 frame rates in multiplayer matches, but that’s no surprise as it’s the most demanding title in our current test suite—and at least you can drop to Medium detail to get a substantial improvement.
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Samsung Series 7 Gaming Recommended Settings for 1920x1080 |
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| Game | Detail | FPS | Notes |
| Batman: Arkham City | Very High + PhysX | 31 | As one of the few titles where PhysX makes a noticeable difference, we recommend using it rather than enabling DX11. |
| Battlefield 3 | Medium | 37.9 | Multiplayer might be pushing it at these settings, in which case you may need to drop the resolution. |
| Civilization V | Low | 31.9 |
Civ5 needs a better driver, and we’ve seen higher scores in the past. Until then, setting everything to “Low” is your best bet for 1080p. |
| DiRT 3 | High + 4xAA | 52.9 |
Very fluid at the High defaults with 4xAA. If you try Ultra without AA, you’ll be around 32FPS. |
| Portal 2 | Max + 4xAA | 66.5 |
You can pretty much max out the settings in Portal 2 and still maintain fluid frame rates; even 8xAA or 16xCSAA will run fine. |
| Skyrim | Ultra + 4xAA | 39.4 | There are no issues with maxing out the settings in Skyrim—you can even use 8xAA if you feel the need at the cost of a few FPS. |
| Total War: Shogun 2 | Very High + 4xAA | 35.0 | The Very High defaults with 4xAA are again very playable; if you run into performance issues, turn off AA to get another 5-10 FPS. |
With the GT 650M, we’re almost at the point where we can just recommend using our Enthusiast settings across all the tested games—almost, but not quite. Batman, Battlefield, Civilization, and DiRT all fall below 30 FPS at our Enthusiast (max detail + 4xAA) settings and require backing off just a bit. As noted in the table, we prefer enabling PhysX in Batman over running with DX11—you’ll need some form of GTX GPU at the very least to enable both without dropping into the 20s. Battlefield remains a GPU killer and needs a lot more than a GT 650M to handle 1080p at higher quality settings. Civilization still needs a better driver, and DiRT need to step back from the Ultra settings to High (which basically doubles the frame rates).
Obviously, we’re not testing a huge number of games, but the above results should hold for most other titles as well. More demanding titles will need to run at Medium to High detail settings at 1080p, while older and/or less demanding games (like Diablo III) can easily be run at maximum detail with 4xAA. Short of games taking another jump forward in requirements—something we really haven’t seen since DX11 titles started shipping—the GT 650M ought to remain adequate for gaming for a couple years at least (but don’t quote me one that).
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Darkstone - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
You can ctrl-c ctrl-v a chart from excel into mspaint ;).JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
You get an extra 1px border around the graph doing that, which isn't terrible I suppose. (As a side note, older versions of Photoshop/Office *sucked* if you tried the Copy/Paste trick, which is why I got in the habit of doing the screenshot, paste, crop). I still need to upload and put it into the CMS, though, which is honestly the more painful part.MadMan007 - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
No problemo, it's a great review and details like the 'real speeds' as affected by thermals are very important. Seems like we are moving toward form over function in the pursuit of thinness.DanNeely - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
The LCD page has a gallery for the Lenovo M92 desktop pc.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Weird. I guess there was a glitch in the gallery engine, because I know I created the LCD gallery! Dustin must have done his gallery at the same time and somehow it overwrote my LCD images. :-( Anyway, thanks for the heads up; the gallery has been recreated.nerd1 - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
In the article you suggests retina MBP is way better in cooling, but it actually is not. Some german benchmark sites (including notebookcheck) reports exactly same throttling issue when they load CPU and GPU at the same time. (GPU running fine but CPU throttles down to 1.2Ghz, AND core temp exceeding 100 degree Celcius)Practically it is perfectly fine as most 3D games are bottlenecked by GPU performance, but you should update your article. I think thin laptops just cannot cool enough.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I guess I didn't make that entirely clear; I mention the $2100 rMBP as an example of a more expensive laptop (with a better display and materials) that still has potential thermal issues. I've updated the paragraph to better reflect my intention. Pretty much you can't get thin, fast, quiet, and affordable -- and in many cases, you can't even get three of those items without a bit of compromise.tipoo - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I can't find much reference to it throttling online , and Anandtechs own review points out how much better it is than the old models at that.http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-mac...
I'm curious how the non-retina current 15" model is.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
The fact that performance drops by 5% running just a game over time suggests there's at least some throttling taking place. Push the CPU to 100% while playing a game (e.g. by running Cinebench on three of the CPU cores) and we should see a greater drop. I'm going to ping Anand and see if he can run that stress test, just to confirm/deny the potential for throttling.tipoo - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
I appreciate that, a quick article on whether both new Macbooks throttle would be interesting. Seems like a wider problem than I expected.I wonder of a small drop like 5% could just be lack of thermal headroom to turbo to the highest frequencies?