Samsung Series 3 NP355V5C-S01US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Titan Silver)

Fastest laptop you will find for this price point. There is a plethora of AMD/Intel comparisons out there on sites like anadtech and tomshardware but all you need to know is any AMD chip beats out their price range competitor (in so few words). (In a few more words AMD has a better GPU while Intel has a fast single core speed... blah, blah, blah. Yeah, of course if you buy a $2k Intel machine it will be faster than this $750. But you're on this page because you wanted to see what the best mobile AMD systems can do. This thing, first thing I did was download steam and buy Skyrim and Dishonored. Opening them brings you straight into high settings across the board. Done deal. Windows 8 is cool, you have a mobile-esque start menu and a charms menu on the right or you simply use the desktop like you do with Windows 7. Boots up before you can sip your coffee (I admit I almost miss having those load screen coffee breaks).

My personal recommendation, is to go ahead and buy a couple of 4GB sticks of RAM and swap out the 2 sticks that are in there. You need a certain type for this laptop: [8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory Model]. This is about a $40.00 upgrade. Aside from that you can also upgrade from the HDD to a SSD. But these are things you don't even need to do because this machine doesn't even need the extra speed those upgrades will certainly provide. But who knows, maybe you like the thought of being able to upgrade like me. What to look out for: the new mobile processor release for next year sometime if it still ends up coming out for the same socket.

A gaming machine? Check. A workstation? Check.

WARNING: PURCHASING THIS SAMSUNG LAPTOP does not get you a copy of Windows 8. I am trying to install a new hard drive in the computer, but the Windows 8 copy on the machine is REGISTERED TO SAMSUNG.

I've had several weeks to use this laptop, so here are my considered opinions. I purchased this laptop because it was pretty much the only laptop with dual graphics without two discrete cards that was anywhere near my budget. My goal was to have a laptop that could acceptably run some recent games but still be a portable machine for everyday work. I wanted to casually game without having to have a huge, heavy, expensive, hot, and noisy laptop. Plus, I'm a huge AMD homer.

This laptop succeeds brilliantly given that criteria. It has hours of unplugged battery life doing anything but gaming. The discrete card doesn't turn on until I run a game. It runs DX11 games at playable frame-rates at medium settings (only after installing the proper AMD video drivers though, which the automatic software updates don't seem to do for some reason). I wonder how many reviewers are reviewing AMD laptops without proper driver setup or without altering the settings for max performance as opposed to max battery life. I notice no substantial performance difference between the A10 and i5 devices I have used. Oddly enough, web browsing and multitasking seem subjectively a bit faster on the A10, though benchmarking programs say that I should experience noticeably less performance out of the A10. I just wonder if the APU architecture operates differently enough from previous processors that the benchmark software isn't reflecting reality. I also think the idea that you MUST have a touchscreen for windows 8 is false. In my experience so far, windows 8 is designed to ALLOW a touch-only device (a phone or tablet) to run windows, not to REQUIRE that every device have a touchscreen.

This laptop is quiet, even with the fan on, and it does not get uncomfortably hot on my lap (like my wife's macbook pro does). It's quite easily portable, and has plenty of external device connections so that there's nothing I need my desktop for. (My old desktop is now a mediaPC).

minor complaints:

The touchpad is not as good as Apple's touchpad (but then again, nobody's is). It was way too sensitive with the tapping and edge swipes, so it would switch apps on me while I was moving the cursor around or would take my cursor somewhere else while I was typing due to accidental contact. The two-finger scrolling was also frustratingly inconsistent. I disabled edge-swipes (which I don't need) and tapping (which I dind;t want) and that totally fixed the first two issues. The third issue seems to have worked its way out over a couple weeks. I think the pad just needs some seasoning or something, but I don't have any of the issues with two-finger scrolling right now that I had right out of the box.

The keyboard is not backlit. This is not something I would have expected that I would miss, but sometimes I kinda do. The screen does generally provide enough illumination to find a specialized key though. However, if the Fn symbols were written in yellow rather than blue, the contrast in low-light situations would be better against the black keys (I think).

My wife's laptop has a gloss screen, which picks up a lot of glare, so I was excited to get a matte screen like this one, and the screen looks good, but has less viewing angle than a gloss screen, but no glare. I dislike the diminished viewing angle, but can't make up my mind whether I dislike it more than the glare from a gloss screen. I guess you can't have everything.

Like any plastic exterior, this one smudges easily, so I have taken to carrying a microfiber cloth in my laptop bag for smudges on the casing.

It would be nice if it came with matched memory sticks instead of a 2GB and a 4GB. As cheap as memory is these days, it seems like shipping with 6GB instead of 8GB is a bit nickel-and-dimey. I'll likely end up upgrading to a faster set of memory sticks.

I give 4 stars instead of five because of these minor complaints, but given another chance I would not order a different laptop. I think for less than $900 you're getting at best a 4 star laptop. I regard a five star rating as near perfection. This is a really good machine, but it's not perfect. In my opinion, it is a great value. Given what I wanted it for, I am not overwhelmed by choices from most laptop manufacturers and am very pleased that Samsung makes this laptop at this price-point.

Buy Samsung Series 3 NP355V5C-S01US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Titan Silver) Now

This laptop is everything I need, great for work and watching movies, and playing games. I recommend this laptop for everyone.

Read Best Reviews of Samsung Series 3 NP355V5C-S01US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Titan Silver) Here

Got this unit at Best Buy in Canada for $499 yesterday and it came with 8GB of ram not 6GB. Best Value by a country mile in an under $500 laptop I could find. Going to try the free AMD RamDrive to see if it works in improving video buffering on web browsing.

Want Samsung Series 3 NP355V5C-S01US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Titan Silver) Discount?

For a general-purpose laptop, this series is probably as good as you'll get for the money. It's fast, quiet, doesn't get too hot, and seems fairly sturdy. It's perfectly serviceable for gaming, although some newer games (e.g. Bioshock Infinite) need to run at lower settings to get smooth performance. The screen is nice and sharp, although it has a fairly narrow viewing angle, the keyboard is responsive and has a nice feel to it, and the number pad is a nice addition. Sound is ok for laptop speakers, but still a bit tinny.

Main complaint is the bundled Samsung software, which is buggy, crash-prone, can make the computer somewhat unstable if you're doing something computationally intensive like video processing, and has the habit of randomly waking the computer out of sleep mode and not letting it go back at odd hours if it's not turned off completely. It's also pretty deeply integrated, making it an incredible pain in the neck to remove.

If you don't mind a few hours of googling and fiddling to strip out the bloatware -or can just put up with it -it's an excellent machine for the price.