Samsung R580 15.6in notebook
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Review Such is the pressure on PC makers to come up with ever more compelling designs - let alone exciting internals - that they must get so absorbed in their work that they forget to check on what their rivals are up to.
Samsung's R580: over designed?
Case in point: Samsung's new R580, a 15.6in entertainment-centric notebook that's all kitted out in a deep burgundy fading to black at the edges - all under a glossy, transparent veneer - that brings nothing to mind so much as LG's Scarlet series of HD TVs.
Come to think of it, the R580 owes a lot to Samsung's own tellies, too, and that's the way the world's going: computers as extensions of all the other home entertainment kit we clutter our living rooms with. Opening the R580 up, you'll notice that the screen bezel's satin black styling wouldn't look out of place on an LCD TV.
The display ditto, since it's a 1366 x 768 LED-backlit panel of the kind found on many a small 720p HD TV set. It's a resolution that's becoming increasingly commonplace on 15in notebooks, but for a screen of this physical size, the resolution really should be higher, at least 1920 x 1080 if the current fad for matching TV resolutions is to be followed.
Captain Scarlet
The screen is driven by Nvidia's GeForce 310M GPU, which has 512MB of GDDR 3 memory of its own but can take some of the R580's 4GB of 1066MHz DDR 3 main memory too, if it needs to. For processing power, the R580 is equipped with Intel's 2.13GHz Core i3-330M, a two-core part with HyperThreading for four-core operation. The CPU has its own graphics core, but it's not used here.
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COMMENTS
nice review, if obsolete already
I bought one of these on Monday. It's the JS04UK spec machine, which has 4 gig of Ram and a 320 Gig disk with Windows 7 64 bit. The top of the range JS05UK runs an i5 with 4 gig ram and 500 gig of disk, also W7 64. This review seems to be of the deprecated JS03UK model spec which samsung no longer ship. The 04 and 05 are the only listed current models for the uk via the importer. The 03 and 02 are still available though.
My observations based on a couple of evenings so far...
The machine seems robust, with a tough solid feel, quite unlike the plastic fantastic budget cases I see provided by work.
Windows Experience chucks out a 5, with the weakest value being the graphics, the rest are 5.5 and up, with the CPU over 6.
Setup took forever, because it insisted on backing up the system, which is a good idea, just not fast.
It also gave the option to partition during install, though with no real info on what to do. Good job I knew what it was fishing for, and I got the scheme I wanted.
Keyboard feels solid and responsive, but I keep hitting the wrong keys because the num pad forces me further to the left on the keyboard than I'm used to. I'll get used to it, I'm sure.
There's a lot of demos, but that's not unusual, and they were soon vanished.
Initially the screen seemed awful, however the setup screens are all low res, and when it finally booted up properly, the screen is sharp and clear.
I bought this as a development box that I can use on trains planes and automobiles, so the target usage is IDEs such as Eclipse, and it runs that smoothly doing builds with no hassle.
Second monitor seems seamless, and took a bit of setting up with resolutions, but nothing untoward.
My biggest complaint is that it's running windows 7, and this is my first encounter with it. I'm not impressed so far, and linux will be trialled shortly.
Good system, crappy keyboard on Canadian model.
I picked up an R780 in Canada about a month ago after my wife's Dell Inspiron 1420 suffered a sudden GPU failure and we needed an immediate replacement. With a GT330M GPU and an i5-430 CPU, it was reasonably specced for both everyday computing tasks and even some light gaming. On the plus side, it's a lot quieter than the Dell that it replaced, and the performance is notably better.
There are a number of downsides to it, however. Samsung really should have done something better with the large swath of plastic between the keyboard and the screen. The odd-looking speakers and the power button still leave a large chunk of real estate empty.
Furthermore, the keyboard of the Canadian model is not the same as the one pictured in this review. The Enter key is double-height but narrower, and the pipe/backslash key has been located to the right of the apostrophe key! If that wasn't annoying enough, they also made a duplicate of the *same* key on the left-hand side of the keyboard between the Z and the now half-width shift key. A poor design choice.
Things I'd like to know...
Can we get pictures of all around the machine? (Even the bottom) Now I know I'm asking a lot here, but can you guys flash up Ubuntu on laptops when you review them? I have no need of a Windows laptop, but Unix/Linux is actually useful (I know - weird).
I quite like laptops with "striking" designs - helps to identify the machine (especially on site where most people have black or grey).
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