Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US)

You may get your software, music, and movies from the cloud, but there are still plenty of folks who like to install programs from disc; rip CDs from, well, CDs; and watch DVDs on the plane. Samsung has a deal for these people: Take your average ultrabook. Add one pound to its weight, bringing it to a still eminently portable 3.9 pounds. Subtract $100 from its price, bringing it to $899.99 list. Outfit it with a 14- instead of 13.3-inch screen, a roomy hybrid hard drive instead of a solid-state drive, and the onboard optical drive that nearly every other ultrabook lacks. Presto: You have the Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US), an affordable alternative to Samsung's super-thin, super-elite Series 9?or, for that matter, the 14-inch, no-optical-drive HP Envy 14 Spectre ($1,399.99 direct, 4 stars).

With its DVD?RW drive and full array of ports, the NP530U4B-A01US splits the difference between ultrabooks like the Dell XPS 13 ($999.99 direct, 4 stars) and ultraportables like the Editors' Choice Toshiba Portege R835-P50X ($888.99 list, 4.5 stars). It also requires a model-number microscope to distinguish from the NP530U3B-A01US, which is a 13.3-inch ultrabook with no optical drive.

Design
At 0.8 by 13.1 by 9.0 inches (HWD), the Series 5 Ultra is fractionally bigger than 13.3-inch ultrabooks and fractionally smaller than 14-inch laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad U400 ($899.99 direct, 4 stars). It sports a handsome silver-gray aluminum lid and palm rest with a flat black chiclet-style keyboard.

The keyboard is not backlit, but has a comfortable if somewhat shallow typing feel with an exemplary layout including dedicated, full-sized Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys. The large touchpad also has dedicated left and right mouse buttons instead of just clickable corners, making it a pleasure to use.

The Series 5 Ultra's 14-inch display has the same 1,366 by 768 resolution you'll find throughout the ultrabook segment. It's nicely bright (300 nits), with a non-reflective matte finish and average viewing angles, and showed minimal flex without feeling flimsy in our grasp-by-the-corners test. Two dinky speakers above the keyboard provide sufficiently loud and clear audio, if not booming bass.

Features
Oddly, our test unit's 802.11n Wi-Fi wouldn't work out of the box, reporting no wireless networks within range even when we pressed Fn-F12 for Samsung's convenient wireless control panel to make sure it was switched on. We used the system restore function to return the Series 5 Ultra to factory defaults, after which Wi-Fi worked fine. Other wireless functions include Bluetooth and Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) for streaming screen and sound to an HDTV set equipped with a $100-or-so Belkin or Netgear adapter.

Next to the tray-loading DVD?RW drive on the Samsung's right side are a USB 2.0 port and SD/MMC memory-card slot. At the left are Ethernet, VGA, and HDMI ports; a headphone/microphone jack; and two USB 3.0 ports.

The Series 5 Ultra's storage system combines a 500GB hard drive (420GB free) with a 16GB solid-state drive dubbed Express Cache. The latter doesn't appear as a drive letter or partition, but is used to speed up booting and resume from sleep, which we stopwatched at roughly 34 and 3 seconds respectively.

Samsung supports the Series 5 Ultra with a one-year warranty. In addition to Windows 7 Home Premium, its software preload includes a 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security, the kudzu-like WildTangent games, and a handful of Samsung-brand utilities ranging from Easy Settings (a friendly alternative to digging through Windows Control Panel) to a Mac OS Dock-like (or Windows Taskbar-like) program launcher.

Performance

The Series 5 Ultra has the same 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-2467M processor and 4GB of RAM as a number of other ultrabooks including the Dell XPS 13, HP Envy 14 Spectre, and Editors' Choice HP Folio 13, and its performance for the most part is in the same ballpark?2 minutes 38 seconds for our Handbrake video encoding test, for example, versus 2:31 for the Spectre and 2:40 for the XPS 13.

Its PCMark 7 score of 2,822 trailed the 3,000-plus scores of the other ultrabooks, because those systems have SSDs and PCMark 7 favors solid-state over hard drive, even hybrid hard drive, platforms. Like other laptops relying on Intel HD Graphics 3000 integrated graphics, the Samsung fell short in our gaming tests, failing to reach 15 frames per second in both Crysis (14.8 frames per second) and Lost Planet 2 (13.3 fps).

The Series 5 Ultra's battery is sealed within the case, so we couldn't confirm its watt-hour rating (Google says 45Wh). It lasted an okay but unexciting 5 hours 47 minutes in our MobileMark 2007 rundown test?competitive with laptops like the Lenovo U400, but an hour or two shy of the best ultrabooks' battery life (and well shy of the 9:26 posted by the Toshiba R835-P50X).

Just as it has a hybrid storage system, the Samsung Series 5 Ultra is something of a hybrid ultrabook: Its 14-inch screen and built-in optical drive will appeal to users who find 13.3-inch, DVD-less ultrabooks too limiting?although we can't help thinking that a lot of those people would be served by an ultrabook plus a $50 USB DVD drive for occasional use. Meanwhile, its weight saving over machines like the Lenovo IdeaPad U400 or Editors' Choice Dell Inspiron 14z, some of which offer better performance, is only about half a pound at most. The bottom line is that the Series 5 Ultra is an appealing system, but a niche one.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE:
Compare the Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US) with several other laptops side by side.

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