Samsung ATIV Book 9 review

Samsung's Ativ Book 9 certainly looks and feels the part of a premium ultrabook.Its sturdy aluminum chassis has the same sweeping lines as Samsung's 13.3-inch Book 9 Plus, but instead of that laptop's eye-popping 3,200x1,800-pixel-resolution display, the Book 9 is 1080p. It's also larger at 15.6 inches -- an unusual, though not unheard of size for ultrabooks.

And that's really the story here with the Book 9 2014 Edition: It's a perfect laptop if you're after more screen space without entirely giving up the thin-and-light body of smaller ultrabooksadp 120mh d netzteil.Though not overpriced, the Book 9 isn't cheap at $1,500, especially if you're used to buying thicker and heavier Windows laptops to get things like ample storage space or discrete graphics. The Book 9 has neither of those things and its specs are fairly average. However, the combination does lead to some extraordinarily long battery life.

Design

The Samsung ATIV Book 9 certainly looks and feels like a premium product. Its attractive aluminum body is a color Samsungm6500 akku calls "Mineral Ash Black" that looks just a little blue in the right light. The hinge and gracefully tapered sides provide a welcome silver accent, while a Samsung logo, also silver, on the lid adds a touch of class.Based on the way most laptops sound, I’d venture a guess that audio is the last thing engineers think about when they design laptops. In fact, I’d go one step further to speculate that marketing efforts drive most laptop builders’ decisions to collaborate with audio companies. But I won’t lump Samsung’s 2014 ATIV Book 9 in that crowd, because it sounds absolutely divine-especially with headphones.

The Samsung ATIV Book 9 is a beautiful, elegantly thin laptop that will turn heads when you pull it out of your designer messenger bag. It’s the thinnest, sexiest notebook we’ve reviewed this year. But it’s much more pedestrian under the hood-with one exception. It’s equipped with a Wolfson WM5102 audio CODEC (encoder/decoder). If you’re an audio enthusiast, your ears just pricked up. Wolfson produces some of the world’s finest DACs (digital-to-analog converters).At 14.74 x 9.84 x 0.63 inches and 4.4 pounds, the ATIV Book 9 is significantly thinner and more compact than other 15.6-inch notebooks in its class, including the Toshiba Satellite P50T (14.9 x 9.6 x 1.1 inches, 5.2 pounds) and the Dell XPS 15 (14.6 x 10 x 0.7 inches, 4.6 pounds). The Book 9 is also slimmer than the 15-inch MacBook Pro dell m3800 netzteil with Retina Display (14.1 x 9.7 x 0.71 inches, 4.5 pounds).

Display

The Book 9's 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 touch display provided vibrant colors and wide viewing angles on our tests. When we watched trailers for "X-Men: Days of Future Past" and "Guardians of the Galaxy," the blue in Mystique's skin and the green in Gamora's body really popped. Fine details, such as the wrinkles in Hugh Jackman's forehead, were also clearly visible.At 279 nits of brightness, the Samsung ATIV Book 9 is quite a bit brighter than the 256-nit category average, the 229-nit Toshiba Satelliteasus ac adapter pa 1121 28 and the 211-nit Dell Inspiron 15. However, the Dell XPS 15 measured an even-brighter 364 nits. Colors remained true even as we moved 90 degrees to the left or right.The gentle curves at the back have just enough room for its full-size HDMI and three USB ports (one USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0) as well as a headphone/mic jack, security slot, and small inputs for Ethernet and VGA out that require dongles to use (the former is included, the latter will set you back $40). An SD card slot is behind a spring-loaded door on just under the curve on the right side.

For wireless, the Book 9 has Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi courtesy of an Intel Wireless-AC 7260 chip. There's WiDi, too, for connecting wirelessly to an external display or TV.While the Book 9's larger screen makes it a bit less travel-friendly than a 13.3-inch model, having the extra space to work is really nice, especially if this is going to be your only computer. And the display is a nice one, with wide viewing angles and 300-nit brightness.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The ATIV Book 9's wide, island-style keys provide a decent typing experience, despite their shallow travel and limited feedback. At 1mm of vertical travel and requiring just 50 grams of actuation force, the Book 9's keys fell below both the Toshiba Satellite P50T asus netzteil adp 120zb bb and the Inspiron 15. Samsung’s machine does have other positive attributes. Its backlit, island-style keyboard feels awesome under the fingertips, delivering just the right tactile feedback. And its oversized trackpad is exceedingly responsive and accurate. And despite its slim proportions, Samsung’s engineers managed to squeeze in two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, a full-sized HDMI out, gigabit Ethernet (you’ll need to use the provided dongle), an SD card slot, and even an analog video output.

Nevertheless, the keys felt fairly springy. On the Ten Thumbs Typing Test, we achieved a rate of 79 words per minute with a 3-percent error rate, slightly below our 86 wpm/1-percent norm. The keyboard's backlight isn't particularly bright but was more than adequate for seeing the keys.The backlit keyboard is nice, too. The larger body gave Samsung room for a spacious keyboard with no awkwardly sized keys and each has a curved key cap, which Samsunga11 200p1a says cushions finger tips. Typing does feel soft without being mushy and there's a fair amount of travel despite the shallow body.

The Samsung Ativ Book 9 2014 Edition is an attractive aluminum-clad 15.6-inch laptop made for mobility with a body that's less than 4.5 pounds, barely more than 0.5 inch thick, and all-day battery life. Its backlit keyboard and large touchpad are generally excellent as is its 1080p-resolution LCD.The 4.25 x 3-inch, buttonless touchpad provided mostly accurate navigation around the desktop, though we did notice occasional sticking. Windows 8 gestures, such as sliding in from the right for charms or in from the left for the task menu, worked smoothly. Pinch-to-zoom also worked accurately, but we could not enable or use other multi-finger gestures, such as two-finger rotate or three-finger swipe.

Performance

The notebook's 128GB SSD booted into Windows 8.1 Professional in a mere 8 seconds, less than half the 19-second category average and the Satellite P50T's time of 17 seconds, and also much lower than the XPS 15's mark of 14 seconds.In terms of benchmarks, the ATIV Book 9 new hp notebook netzteil squeaked past Dell’s Inspiron 7537 in our Laptop WorldBench 9 benchmark suite. This can be attributed to the presence of an SSD in the Samsung versus the mechanical hard drive in Dell’s machine. PCMark 8-which is one component in that suite-is particularly sensitive to storage performance. But Samsung’s reliance on integrated graphics resulted in its getting crushed in our gaming benchmarks. This is clearly not the machine to buy if you intend to play AAA games. Battery life, on the other hand, is excellent.

The ATIV Book 9 completed the Laptop Mag File Transfer test, which involves copying 4.97GB of mixed media files, in 57 seconds. That's a rate of 89.3 MBps, about on par with the 86 MBps category average but way faster than the Toshiba Satellite P50T (24.5 MBps). The MacBook Pro (309 MBps) and Dell XPS 15 (231.3 MBps) were more than twice as fast, though.It should come as no surprise that the Toshiba and Dell machines I’m comparing to the ATIV Book 9netzteil w510 ended up with the same 3.5-star score. Each of these machines is compelling-and disappointing-in its own way. The Toshiba wows with its resolution, but it’s a bit ahead of its time on that score. The Dell is a great gaming machine for the price, but its chassis isn’t as strong as it should be.

The Samsung ATIV Book 9 is one of the sexiest laptops to come through the Lab this year, but it's expensive for the processing power, memory, storage, and video resolution it has to offer. If you're passionate about high-quality audio, this laptop'slenovo power supply premium price tag is probably justified. Just be sure to install Foobar2000 and its WASAPI component before you plug in your favorite headphones. The notebook completed the Open Office Spreadsheet Macro test, in which we match 20,000 names with their addresses, in 5 minutes and 21 seconds. That's somewhat faster than the category average, but quite a bit slower than the Satellite P50T.

Battery Life

The ATIV Book 9 lasted a strong 8 hours and 38 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery test, which involves continuous surfing over Wi-Fi at 100 nits brightness. That time is far better than the category average, the Toshiba Satellite P50T'sasus ux31a ladekabel time of 2 hours and 38 minutes. However, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display lasted 8 hours and 57 minutes.The Toshiba is thicker and heavier, its audio components aren’t anywhere near as luscious, and its battery life is appalling (part of the price you pay you for 4K resolution), but that’s a lot of extras for not very much money. And then there’s Dell’s Inspiron 15 7000-series laptop, also with a Core i7 CPU, and a discrete Nvidia GPU driving its 15.6-inch touchscreen at the same resolution as the Samsung.Though not overpriced, the Book 9 isn't cheap at $1,500, especially if you're used to buying thicker and heavier Windows laptops to get things like ample storage space or discrete graphics. The Book 9 has neither of those things and its specs are fairly average. However, the combination does lead to some extraordinarily long battery life.

Software and Warranty

Samsung bundles the ATIV Book 9 with a few useful utilities and a little bit of bloatware. Samsung Link lets you share content wirelessly between the notebook and other Samsung devices, including your phone, tablet and home entertainment system. Samsung SideSync lets you control your phone from your PC when it is connected over USB, allowing you to run the phone environment in a window or transfer files back and forth.Samsung backs the ATIV Book 9 with a standard 1-year warranty on parts and labor. The company scored a solid 89 out of 100 in our most recent tech support showdown, earning it a third-place finish out of nine brands.