Gadgetory

hey I'm Nate rock at the verge and we were checking out these samsung series seven gamer now this thing is big it's got a 17.3 inch display with a 1920 by 1080 resolution it's gonna be good for your general gaming needs but it also makes the Machine really heavy it's about nine point six pounds and you're gonna have to keep it tethered to because the battery life is pretty poor we got about three and a half hours on the verge battery test so the series seven gamer sports a full-sized keyboard which is kind of expected on machine this big and it's also really appreciated the keys are traditional scissor style laptop keys now there is backlighting on this keyboard but the options are kind of limited Samsung lets you have blue and white some other highlights on the hardware and are the speakers which are pretty good there's a symbol for underneath the machine so the machine has a little more room for a little more bass than we can expect from a lot of laptops now the port selection on the stereo seven gamer is pretty standard you've got your power adapter your Gigabit Ethernet port VGA port HDMI and DisplayPort a pair of USB 3.0 ports and there's the card reader up above that and then your headphone and microphone jacks on the opposite side we've got another pair of USB 2.0 ports there's a blu-ray drive and then there's the mode switch there are four modes to choose from right now we're in gaming mode but we can switch down to balance mode library mode and eco mode now these are essentially glorified power plans in Eco mode the screen is dimmed and the poweris power on the CPU is throttled down to give you the maximum possible battery life library mode is designed for when you're inside of a library in addition to dimming the screen a bit it actually cuts powers to the fans and thaws the CPU so the machine doesn't make too much noise balance mode is your typical pcs balance mode it's kind of a nice middle ground and then there's gaming mode which I suspect most people will keep the Machine locked to when you fire up gaming mode a small widget appears on the top right corner of the screen and it lets you choose between three different things when the themes are kind of over the top and ridiculous but they change the wallpaper it add a nifty little wallpaper theme screensaver to each mode which it's it's kind of pointless but in the best possible way samsung series 7 gamer is pretty fast under the hood is a 2.3 gigahertz core i7 3/6 nqm processor 16 gigs of ram and about one and a half terabytes of hard drive space most of the Ivy Bridge laptops we've seen recently include a 32 gigabyte mSATA solid state cache drive Samsung opted instead to use an 8 gigabyte express cache you're going to see a performance into things like a faster application run or the boot speed it also allows symptom to stick about one and a half terabytes of storage space in here in the form of 2 750 gigabyte hard drives the gaming performance is pretty good the machines running an nvidia geforce gtx 675 m it's not the fastest GPU on the market right now but it's a pretty strong contender we got a smooth 29 frames per second on battlefield 3 on ultra if you dial the settings down to high you'll see about 41 frame per seconds but it feels pretty good the action is smooth for the most part when you get to some of the more intense firefights in the game you might notice a bit of slowdown you can fix that pretty easily by you know dialing down the anti-aliasing settings or even switching to high in battlefield 3 which is still makes the game look fairly gorgeous if you're in the market for a mid-range gaming machine the samsung series 7 gamer will not disappoint it makes some compromises in the performance and the battery life and there might be some qualms about the particular harddrive arrangement but for $1,900 it's a pretty solid deal if you're willing to spend a little more you're going to want to check out the Alienware M 17 X it's gonna cost you an extra $700 but you'll get much better frame rates slightly better battery life and a better performance overall you