Introducing The 2013 Series 7 Chronos with AMD HD8870M!

Browsing with an Android phone, it says you can order today, that is different from what I see browsing with a Windows PC.

 

I think he used 950. It began to artifact at 1000

 

Yeah I did too. You can order it now but you'll only get it once it gets in stock which could be months from now. Nobody knows which kinda angers me. I want this laptop so bad, I need it for my studies and samsung or amazon doesn't say a word.

I chatted and mailed with amazon. They couldn't say anything about date of arrival. They couldn't even tell me whether their description, stating that the np770Z5E-S01FR only had an HD-Panel, was correct or not.

 

So still no idea on release dates for these at all?

 

I'm betting the 11+ hr battery life is on the models with the SSD. Going to a 5400rpm spinning platter will cut into the battery life a bit.

Also, when I played with one I kept ticking down the screen brightness until it stopped saying that the brightness setting may effect battery life. That level is basically one tick below middle although you can drag it up a bit from that. The screen is gorgeous at 1/2 or more brightness but a little dim (in the store) for me at that level, so i'm betting the 6hr guy had his backlight set higher.

Also, since it was a newly purchased machine its a good bet that some of the time the 6hr guy spent with the computer also included installing software either via the web or disk which both will eat a bit of battery.

 

it would be good to see how much battery life it puts out after tweaking it like disabling services and other non-essentials.

 

A few pages back you said that 8770 is also aluminium and that was confirmed by the 8 years old expert. Now you try to force that only 8870 has aluminium bottom. There is only one 780 with different specs and it has plastic bottom which doesn't make any difference.

 

Uhm...the bottom of mine definitely isn't metal. Got home and lugged it around for a bit, and it was definitely warmer than the laptop's lid which is brushed metal.

I'll try to take a picture of the keyboard area, but you can pretty clearly see the inlaid brush metal for the palm rests, and around it is the rest of the computer, which i'm pretty sure is composite / plastic.

Also want to agree with the other owners already...the boot after the 'initial' boot / setup, this thing took about 40 seconds to get to the starting screen. Bloody hell!

This needs an SSD badly.

Very finicky display brightness...like it can't make up its mind sometimes.

AFter bootup; just wandering the internet. Battery says 5hr10min remaining on 98% charge.

another edit: the sound on this laptop is excellent. i was quite surprised how deep the tones were. actually sounds better than my desktop speakers (Which are rather old, to be fair).

 

How high is your brightness set? If your not using your dedicated GPU or doing anything processor intensive the screen brightness is the single biggest battery draw.

 

Phelan, shut off adaptive brightness under the power profile.

 

brightness set to 50%

found it and turned it off...that helped. thanks nemessis

well i won't know how much i'll be able o get out of this comp until this weekend because my schedule is all over the map during the weekdays. we'll see what happens this weekend.

 

I went in and played with it at the local best buy today as well. The bottom does feel different from the lid and is some sort of composite. The battery said about 5 hrs at 95%. I'm not sure what the brightness was set to though.

It is thin and a nice looking laptop. It is really heavy though. I'm still using a super old Dell Vostro 1500 and it felt about the same weight.

 

It is only 5.18 pounds. My current Macbook Pro Retina is about 4.5 pounds, and I think it's very light from my use. So I think the slightly heavier weight won't be a huge deal.

 

It's about 5.3 lbs and you'd be surprised at how much difference that additional weight makes. The MBP Retina feels nice and light when carried compared to this laptop. I guess there's just a certain threshold for weight at this size and form factor before it feels heavier than it should be. The Sony VAIO also feels lighter despite having an optical drive. One thing this notebook has going for it is the excellent cooling, I was pretty impressed by the dual fans and thick heatpipes. That probably is a reason it weighs what it does.

 

Has anyone confirmed that you can upgrade the ram to 16GB yet? I've seen that it is 4+4 stock configuration but I'm not sure if one of the ram slots is soldered on or not.

 

Joker did you by chance load any games on yours? Wondering what you think of the 8770

 

Id say it's a little lighter than the Vostro 1500, maybe a pound but its wider so probably feels about the same in one hand. I had a Vostro too, great machine and the last 16x10 (1650x1080) displays ive had. I wish they would go back, im so sick of 16x9.

 

The one I played with at best buy... when I touched the screen, the screen would wiggle a bit. It was solid while typing but would wiggle when using the touch screen... not bad but a bit worse than the yoga or zenbook prime touch ive played with. ANyone else notice this?

Also, does anyone know if SD cards slide all the way in the slot on this one or if they stick out 1/2 way like on the asus ultrabooks?

 

So, following this thread for a while and what I can see is that the Asus UX51-XH71 has a lot more going for it except the GPU, of course. I mean, the Asus one has 2x256 GB SSD, a GT650m GGDR5 which is close to a GTX660m, all aluminium front and rear and is about the same price.....mmmhhhh what should I do? Wait or get the Asus?.

 

yeah, that is exactly how I held it...with one hand at the center. The Vostro has done me well over the years (since 2006!) but its on its last leg.

 

I put the free version of team fortress 2 on it and it seemed pretty smooth at 1920x1080p with high settings. I haven't had a chance to mess with it much since the gf uses it everyday. I'm selling my M18x and planning to get the 8870M version or possibly a Sony T series, just not sure yet. If I get the 8870M version, then I'll do some thorough testing for sure.About the ram, I don't think there is soldered ram on there. The module I took out was 8 GB from what I remember, I can check later or someone else here can.

 

I recently (last week) cleared off my vostro 1500 and sold it for $180. Didn't think it was that bad a deal at all... it was high end for the time though 4gb, vista, 1680x1050 display 9800gt video and t9300 core 2 duo. whew. lol.

 

The asus is a pound lighter, doubt it gets as good of battery life and doesn't have touch which counts it out for me since the main purpose of my upgrade is touch (it will be my new dev machine)

 

that configuration is around USD$2,500 last time I checked; not even in the same league

 

Anybody know how this ram accellerator works and if it has anything to do with the boot times changing with successive boots... first boot i tried was over 40 seconds but by the third boot it was down to a more manageable 20 seconds.

 

Just to get this straight once and for all:
Which model numbers refer to which laptops?
I'm a n00b in this thread and am confused.

 

The new U500VX does have touch though, and if around 6 hours is right, gets comparable battery life. Also comes with IPS display and raid SSDs, which is pretty tight.

It's about $2,200 now, although in countries where the U500VX has been released its supposedly dropped more towards around $2K. I'd say that's comparable to the $1.7K chronos considering you're getting SSDs and better screen technology.

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Just give up. It's slaughtered or someone confuses it every other page.

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Model numbers will vary alot depending on what country you are looking in. Most people here seem to be referring to them by the graphics card included... either the 8770m that is in the one recently released to best buy stores in the USA and the 8870m higher end GPU thats hasn't seen the light of day in the US yet.

In the US at least no one has posted prices or specifics about the higher end model except that it has the higher end 8870m gpu that was demo'ed at CES a couple weeks ago. It may have an SSD instead of the HD and its construction might be different but thats not nailed down yet.

 

I don't really mind the touch panel but the quality of components and build in general. I think Asus we all agree has a far better experience in building PC components and by the reviews of the UX51vz looks a solid light gaming machine. Probably the only one of its kind. I found an offer at 1.8k which, if I compare to the expected release price of the 770Ze5 around 1.6k, is a no brainer considering it has 2x256gb SSD in raid 0 that eat alive anytime a 1TB HDD a aluminium unibody of the chasis in contrast to the mosaic plastic/aluminium, weight 2 kilos instead 2.5 kilos (believe me 500g is noticeable) and almost certain that all other components inside the case are of high standards.

However, the Samsung interest me because of the 8870m GPU and the high performance CPU, thus the dilema of what to do...

 

I'll have to go against agreeing that asus being better built... My last main machine (just sold it a couple weeks ago) was a g73sw-3de and it was a great machine except it never could resume properly... after waking from resume the fans would race like it was going to fly off my desk and keep cycling through max fan and low fan. The thing is i just always thought it was loud... didn't realize it until I got a zenbook prime (thats normally whisper quiet) that did the same thing after resume, and exchanged it for one that didn't do it but had other problems, so exchange it again for another one with the resume fan issue and exchanged it for a fourth one... that the fan worked fine, but it had an different brand SSD in it that was 1/10 the speed on writes as the one in the others ones I bought. After finding a good ultrabook in 4 tries with asus I ended up getting a new Vizio 14" 1600x900 at walmart for $600 to hold me over until touch came along... and guess what its been an amazingly solid machine, quite impressed with it and doubtful I will buy another asus. In fact I wanted to get an all in one that folded flat but the only choice right now is the asus 23" ET2300 so Im waiting til lenovo gets theirs out later this year... an all in one with the resume/fan bug would be horrid.

 

Well, reading many reviews from experts and customers apparently the UX51vz is a solid ultrabook. It did have some issue with noisy fans which was quickly addresed is a BIOS update and now runs smooth and quiet except when gaming, of course.

I don't have experience with Asus notebook but my desktop, which I build myself, have always had Asus motherboard and the 3 of them so far rock solid, literally.

 

Then that is a great thing, my friend. I'm ditching this MBP for this beast because I want the extra processing power and I need to get back to my home with Windows on the beautiful new Windows 8. It is a more than willing compromise for me to make to have a little extra weight in exchange for much more GPU and CPU power.

Great news you said about the cooling power. Is it really that good? I noticed on a internal shot someone posted a few days ago that the dual fans have blades that are asymmetrically shaped and positioned. For those of you who don't know what this means, it is a technique that I believe started with the release of this Macbook Pro Retina that I am typing on right here. Basically, having them asymmetrically placed instead of symmetrically allows them to be MUCH more silent.

And let me tell you, THEY WORK. This Macbook with that type of fan technology makes literally ZERO noise at any time, unless the fans are at 100% while gaming. Very, very happy to see them on this Samsung.

You all should be proud of this fact! Can't wait to get my hands on the 8870 model ASAP!

My Macbook Pro Retina has the 650M and let me tell you, it isn't that good. It struggles to run almost any modern game on max settings. The 8870 model of this Samsung that is coming out soon has over double the power of the 650m. That's significant. And that's why I'm selling this MBP for this Samsung. Well, that among other reasons

Also, if I'm not mistaken i've heard the Asus has a terrible fan noise and it gets EXTREMELY hot while gaming. Deal breakers. Stick with this Samsung

 

They build solid hardware and have some very compelling designs... the g73 served me well and had a screen like no other (17.3" 1080p matte 120hz) but having seen the same fan issue after resume on multiple models and their inability to address it in the models I had have put me off them. Especially in the zenbooks which seem to be evolving fast so they tend to take the 'we will fix it in the next version' attitude. The other thing that bugged me was using multiple suppliers for parts when the parts were not of equal performance.

The 650m in the retna display macbook at max settings isn't a good example of the 650m... that retna display is alot higher than 1080p res so you are pushing alot more pixels around the screen.

Wow, i just looked at passmark... i thought the i7-3635qm would be in the same ballpark as the i7-3630qm but apparently not, it benchmarks about 2000 points lower than the i6-3630qm. They both start at 2.4/3.4ghz cpus with same same memory speeds and cores/threads... I wonder why the 3635qm in the best buy version clocks so much lower and I wonder if the higher end version will have a 3630 or other faster CPU. They are both 45w parts.

 

Recent article on Engadget

Samsung Series 7 Chronos trickles into US stores

 

Hahaha you don't think I know that? Of course I'm not running any games in 2880 x 1800 (Retina resolution). I have yet to find a game that can run in that resolution at playable framerates. It doesn't even come close to being able to handle gaming at Retina resolutions.

I'm talking about how it can't even handle most games at max settings at a resolution like 1600 x 900, or 1920 x 1080. Or 1440 x 900. Trust me, the 650m isnt that good at all.

That's awesome. Just saw this too. Too bad they don't know that it's only the 8770m model and the 8870 model is nowhere in sight.

unfortunately....

 

Couldn't find the answer after a few searches, so I'll just ask: can this notebook house two hard-disks? I love the speed of SSD, but need a decent amount of storage to carry my music collection around (FLAC audiophile).

 

I think right now the general consensus is...no.

Use cloud storage

 

The PERFECT notebook that we're all looking for will never come into existence.

 

You could just use a hybrid drive, they have them with 8+ gb + 500/750gb hds. Best of both worlds, kinda in one drive.

 

First, saying that the 8870 will have over double the performance of the GT650m GGDR5 2GB version (retina is 1GB version, btw) is pushing it too hard. The GTX670m, which for sure is superior to the 8870m, beats the GT650m at its top by 47%, which is significant of course, but far from being over double.

Second, my desktop for gaming has a GTX690 so what I look in an ultrabook is a balance of something I can work with, carry around and occasionally play some games. The lightweight together with a relative fair gaming capacity of the UX51vz seems balanced. Of course, the Samsung seems also sexy but I am being put off by the HDD instead SSD, the price and the build of the laptop (plastic and mixtures).

Third, I can't say from personal experience but the fan problem was apparently addressed in a BIOS update to the UX51vz ad everyone seems quite happy. Check the Asus forum. Also, as I understand the UX51vz does not throttle the CPU and GPU as the Chronos with the 8770m seems to do according to someone who already posted here so, in that case, if the 8870m also throttles probably the difference in performance compared to the UX51vz won't be that big after all.

Finally, GT650m benchmarks to avoid speculations on the performance:

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

This is a review on the UX51vz:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-Zenbook-UX51VZ-U500VZ-Notebook.84246.0.html

I wish that there were reviews available to the Samsung 770Z5E already so I could make a more informed decision...

 

Id really like to see some benchmarks from the 8770 version of this and get an idea if its throttling. If its throttling then the 8870 might not be all that much better as it will likely thottle as well to keep the heat down. With these specs id likely be happy with anything approaching the 650m in performance. My last rig had a 460m.

My other big questions are if it can be boosted to 16gb of ram, and is the HD accessible for upgrading it to an SSD.

I'm trying to decide between getting the best buy version (if it comes in stock anywhere while its on sale for $1199) or waiting for the beefed up version.

 

While I would definitely prefer the touch screen version, most unfortunately it's glossy only, ie. no matte.

Unless you live underground with little light, otherwise reflection from sunlight or lamps onto the screens is really annoying.

I'll be going for the matte version with no touch screen, sigh. Question for Series 7 designers, is touch screen matte display *mission impossible*?!

Just look at the glorious reflection on the touch screens in the videos below, argh, what are Samsung people thinking?

 

In EU there is no 8770m, just 17 inch +8870 with all configurations (...A01-A04)
Maybe they noticed 1200€ > 1200$ and stopped the usual 1:1 conversion.

Also Samsung isn't that popular in US, Apple still leading. Maybe that's why no one seems to care about Chronos and Series 9, even if they beat the hell out of Zenbooks and MACs.

Tested both, 900x3c and Zenbook - took me 5 seconds to decide just by build quality and fan noise - series 9 fan never turned on in office etc. Asus devices are low quality and it looks like a 300$ notebook except the hight.

 

lol, i waiting for exactly the same thing. notebookcheck is the only place i trust with laptop reviews. very thorough

 

i think ever since the first iphone brought about the coming of capacitive touch displays, the older "matte" resistive touch displays simply died out. to be honest i haven't seen ANY consumer electronics that still utilizes a resistive touch panel (oh except for GPS which i guess it's a good thing due to visibility). but all in all glossy capacitive displays are just light years better than matte ones in terms of user experience(when you are not under the sun.)

on a side note, i personally think glossy and this whole reflective thing isn't a big issue for normal users. i don't think a lot of ppl actually use laptops under direct sunlight, they often go indoors, i've yet to find an indoor room with lamps that hinders my ability to read off the screen.

 

How long 17" 8870M version has been available for by now? Do you think we can hope for a review by notebookcheck in a few days? I know it's a 17 inch laptop, but at least we can have some benchmark and gaming test for the 8870.

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Why don't you buy the 17" version on stock ? :

 

Because I find 17" too big . I like this laptop for its extreme power/size ratio, the 17" kinda defeats the purpose of buying this laptop for me.

 

Since a week or more. First wave already sold out (Amazon has it too).
As I said, media doesn't know about it. But otherwise if you take a look how Samsung handles releases...

You will see how it looks like when Apple announces new MACs.
2nd point is, if they need any longer to release them, you can wait 2 months more and buy a Haswell model.

 

I'm sorry, but this pretty much flies in the face of what the majority of Asus owners and Zenbook reviewers have said about the machine. While I agree that Samsung series 9 is an awesome machine, the majority of Zenbook owners love their devices, the only consistent complaint being fan noise, which has been universally addressed by a bios update. Samsung on the other hand seems to have varied hardware issues across its entire range. Add to this the fact that last gens Chronos machines had their own slew of issues and I'll definitely be waiting for benchmarking/performance reviews before I buy one.

As for people saying the 8870M will double the power of a 2GB 650M, I can't help but be skeptical. Based on historical benchmarking, AMD GPUs always tend to fall short of their expected performance. They also struggle to keep up with driver support. On top of all of this is the fact that the 8770M appears to be throttled in the lower Chronos version. I have always been a proponent of AMD hardware when building PCs and when purchasing notebooks but lately they have seemed to struggle and it's gotten harder to justify purchasing devices with their hardware even though it tends to be cheaper. The 7970M was an awesome chip but even that struggled with driver support for a while, and older systems were plagued by poor graphic switching.

It's definitely true of modern games that a solid SSD greatly improves performance. Take the cost of buying a 128 or 256 and the price difference drops.

I definitely won't buy either a U500VX or Chronos until I read reviews, but to say one clearly kills the other is just silly without some testing.

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