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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creed3020 - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
"Dell XPS 15 results in yellow"The yellow bars show the Aver V3 and not the Dell. The Dell laptop has the standard ark blue colour.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Fixed, thanks.npaladin2000 - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I own a 15 inch version of the previous generation, these are excellent machines, but yes, an enthusiast will not be satisfied with it as-is. I ended up throwing in a 512 Gb SSD and an Intel A/B/G WiFi card. Getting into these is NOT easy, so I'm not looking forward to any equipment failures, but these things are solid, compact, quiet, with a good layout, blowing all the exhaust to the BACK, as it should be. And I have to say the keyboard is the best one short of a Thinkpad that I've ever used.Never knock sleek and thin, particularly if you have to travel with the thing. I went from an Asus N53SV to this, the Asus was a real pain anywhere except at home on my desk, and on the occasional hotel desk (took up a lot of room there). The Series7, even the 17 inch, is a much more desirable travel companion.
Samsung just needs to make service easier somehow.
knekker - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Right now i am just waiting for a 17inch laptop with ips panel, that actually offers nvidia 680m in it, instead of those insanely overpriced quadro graphic cards. along with the Maximus technology.Zzzz Zzzz
aravenwood - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I have an Alienware M17x R3. I bought primarily for the keyboard (best in class, in my opinion) and the screen secondarily, for the build quality tertiary. How does the Samsung stack up against the M17x R3 keyboard? All the keyboards I used before the Alienware caused pain in my fingers after five minutes of use programming. The two sore points for me are where I interact most with the machine - the keyboard (fingers/wrist/hand) and the screen (eyes).JarredWalton - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Dustin did the M17x reviews, so I'm not sure personally how they compare. The Alienware is more of a traditional style key shape as opposed to chiclet, though, so I could definitely understand people preferring Alienware's keyboard. Interestingly, it's also missing the "context key" -- am I like the only person that uses that key? Also, anyone know if it's possible to remap something like right Alt to the context key? Might make me happier.In general, I prefer the size and weight of the Samsung to the M17x, and I think Samsung has a better display (matte for one). Alienware obviously has more GPU performance and better cooling, as it doesn't have as much difficulty with throttling under maximum load (AFAIK -- correct me if I'm wrong). Cost is also clearly in favor of Samsung, but if you play games I'd say it's an easy choice to go with Alienware. For those that just want a good keyboard, it's a personal opinion thing so you'd probably have to try both laptops out if possible. I still want to play with an MSI GT7 series with the Cherry MX switches (I think that's the one, right?) just to see how it feels.
durinbug - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I have the 15" version, love it for the most part. The one thing that really bugs me is the trackpad. I constantly have issues with it misinterpreting a quick lift of the finger and move back to center as a left click, as when scrolling or going from one side of the screen to the other, something I haven't encountered with any other trackpad I've used. It also often doesn't manage a tap-to-doubleclick, instead selecting and then dragging things. Yes, I could push harder for the physical button click, but that just isn't very intuitive - and the pressure required often results in inadvertent movement of the cursor anyway.(I was also annoyed because they gave me inaccurate information about the hard drive; I was looking at two similar-but-slightly-different model numbers at two different retailers, one advertising 750 GB 7,200 RPM hard drive, the other advertising 1 TB HD. Contacted Samsung to find out how fast the 1 TB drive was, as the retailer couldn't tell me, and was assured that it was also 7,200 RPM after a very long wait for him to look up information. Turns out it's not, it is a slower 5,400 RPM drive. I'd have preferred less space w/ a faster drive, but oh well - some day I'll stick a large SSD in. Only after getting it did it occur to me to look at HDs offered separately, and it turned out no one was selling 7,200 RPM 1 TB laptop drives - should have clued me in).
abrowne1993 - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Anand said you'd be handling the UX31A review, Jarred. Any idea when that'll be out?JarredWalton - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Next up on my hot list. :-) Short story: it's the best 13.3" Ultrabook, but it's still an Ultrabook. Keyboard key travel is better than any other UB I've used/tested, and the IPS display is obviously the huge selling point. Build quality is good as well. Only real issue is the price, battery life is decent but not exceptional, and you're still getting basically Ultrabook levels of performance -- fine for most apps, but not for serious number crunching or gaming.abrowne1993 - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Thanks, good to know! I've got a desktop for gaming and other heavy usage, so performance isn't too much of an issue. Build quality, portability, and that wonderful screen were my main interests.