New Samsung Series 7 NP700Z7C-S01US Laptop i7 3615QM 650m Review!

For those who have the laptop, what is the easiest way to clean the speaker grill? I keep getting dust particles in there and can't get them out by compressed air. It's starting to look really dirty

 

vacuum maybe?

 

Maybe, maybe not. The bottom is plastic so it depends if you can pry it off w/o leaving a trace.

 

Just got this Amazon.com: ARCTIC Portable USB-Fan ABACO-BZG00-010000: Electronics

I plugged it in and pointed it at my keboard and screen, now she is cool as a cucumber and no "heat stains" on the monitor that pop up. Little chill on the hands, but you can adjust and...well you cant have it all.

 

Hey all, just pulled the trigger on this laptop. I wanted to wait for the ivy bridge 15" but I had a 35% off coupon that wasn't going to last. Is there anything I should look for on the laptop to make sure everything is okay?

 

35%!? Where? How??

 

Yeah, I'd love to hear about this 35% off coupon - I want one!

 

Sorry guys, its an employee discount.

 

I just tried playing Diablo III at max resolution with everything else turned to low and it stuttered like crazy - at times, when there were more than five enemies on screen at once or when I was using magic, the game was unplayable. Is there anything I can do to improve performance? I'm relatively new to PC gaming so I'd appreciate some input.

 

It might be your internet connection, because when I was downloading something and my sister streaming video on another computer, I experience lag/choppiness. If you are playing on this computer, it should be able to run it with no problems.

 

You were 100% right. I just hard-wired my computer using the ethernet port and the game is running perfectly now. Thanks!

+1 rep

 

Since I have Diablo III running properly now, if anyone would like to add me and raid some duneouns I'm usually on between 8-10 at night (EST). ID is JR233270

 

Has anyone tried running Saints Row The Third on this machine? Amazon has it on sale for $17 right now and it's very tempting. I went to canirunit.com and they said I pass the minimum requirements but don't meet the recommended settings. Any input?

 

Same experience as me, it's mostly the slow HDD making performance suffer it seems

I'd suggest playing at 1366 x 768 with everything set to high except shadows which you should set to medium, that gave me stable fps. But still lags slightly when HDD is working. The HDD lag is reduced after some time of playing (5-10mins).

 

I'm also experiencing very short lags when exploring the worlds but I don't think that the HDD is causing it. The data transfer while playing games isn't that much, not talking about the 8GB of RAM. I think the main problem is the old engine from blizzard. They really have to work on performance. Even high-end PCs have slowdowns from time to time.

I'm playing at 1080p with shadows off and I have an aveage framerate of 55 fps. Sure the fps go down when having a big battle but never fall below 40 fps. Unfortunately every framerate change (e.g. from 60 to 58) causes a little stuttering.

Temps during D3: With the lid open, the temps on the motherboard are between 75 and 80 °C.

 

Hi, just wanted to give my Experience about Service after opening the laptop.

One of my first things I did was replacing the HDD with a SSD and removed Recovery Partitions and so on. Opened the Case according to Paul Nelsons Guide (thanks a lot!!!) And it left only minimal traces by the VGA Port.

The way life is a week after purchase WLAN stopped working (the Intel WLAN Card died) and I had to restock with the HDD (open again) and reinstall so it looked like stock.

Samsung Service (a third party company does this in my country under Samsung Brand) said not a word about it and repaired it, actually as I now have some experience with opening and closing the plastic bottom I noticed that it was not even clicked in on every part. Means they never had this notebook before and I don't think they have a way telling if this was open, only maybe if you slip over the screws often with the screwdriver so the black coating gets blank.

If you dont break anything it will be hart to notice for a service Personal if the notebook was opened and even if you break a small part something while opening in best case the one who opens the laptop from service later may well think it was himself.

 

Thanks so much for your thoughts on this. It seems entirely reasonable and reassuring. The owner's lounge says their aren't any seals that could indicate opening, so it's good to go. Bummer about your card though.

 

Another one thing: Had a gaming session yesterday and I have no problem with Heat, it just gets warm in WASD Area (maybe hot under the "H" where cpu and graphics are but I don't use this Area). I also tried GPU Overclocking and an interesting thing is that I could with Nvidia 301.40 Series Driver get some 900 something Clockspeeds stable BUT it seems it would draw too much power so the CPU throttled to 1Ghz while doing so (GPU stayed up overclocked). I used MSI Combustor for graphics Load (kinda Furmark clone) and Prime95 to make 100% CPU Load. By the way heat seemed not the issue, because the CPU Throtteling was instanteous even when overall temps were cool.

Another interesting thing, the Macbook Pro 15" with AMD 6770 Graphics of my girlfriend gets a lot hotter when gaming everywhere. Actually there is no possible way I can think of to make a very slim Notebook that is also powerful and cool. Make it thick and you can isolate the heat and use bigger cooling or make it thin and do your best to transport the heat away from users Area. And I think samsung was right to use a plastic bottom cover because the Macbook with metal cover gets much hotter at the bottom when under load.

 

Thats right, no seals to break. It took them one week to get a replacement card, if it was out of warranty it would have taken me an hour to buy and 5 minutes to replace the Wlan Card ;-)

 

Thanks. Another question: When you sent it back to Samsung, did you have Win7 on the hdd? Did you clone or just leave the hdd untouched?
Has anyone tried reinstalling the OS on the hdd AFTER already switching to an SSD? I'm asking because I had problems doing so with an HP computer that had a cache drive (mssd).

 

Hey all! I am playing Diablo III on this machine on max settings at 1920x1080 and it runs smooth as butter...and I'm using the stock HDD! Here is a tip--in the graphics options of Diablo III set Max FPS to 60. Cheers

 

As far as I can tell, the third party company doesn't care about anything when repairing the notebook. They just do their job and don't bother about hardware changes or anything else. I had a Samsung TV which had a few dead pixels. When the third party company arrived, they didn't even wanna see the dead pixels and immediately changed the panel. So guys, don't worry about opening your sammy!

PS: the difference in performance between pure SSD and Hybrid (HDD + SSD) is really small! The difference between HDD and Hybrid is quite big. I will stay with my 1 TB HDD. No need to change, really!

 

?? Is this thing out yet, and if so, where can we get it?

 

Yes, it's out. Best Buy, Amazon, New Egg, among others, all carry it.

 

This laptop has been out for over a month.
Here are a list of retailers that currently have it
Samsung

 

I put a Seagate Momentus 750 GB 7200 rpm and it works well with the internal NAND. Just hit the reset button on the Flash memory control panel and it starts fresh. Very snappy indeed. I think this an even better option than to put a Seagate Momentus XT on there because of the ability to manually reset the flash memory.

 

As far as brick and mortar stores, Best Buy has almost depleted their stock but CompUSA has some(under the radar) at the same price.

 

After returning my first unit, I decided to give this laptop another chance.
The one I got now does't have this issue, not at all, so guess I just got an "dud" the first time.

Also got an different HDD in this one, an seagate momentus instead of the samsung disk I had in the other. And it feels faster and is less noisy, I'll take that as an plus too!
Another issue I also don't have with this one is the "n" key being slightly misformed.
So all in all it looks like I hit jackpot!

 

@OC-Freak
nice, would you like to post screenshot of your Windows 7 experience?

I have ordered mine yesterday & waiting for it

 

What "n" key problem are you talking about?

 

what is the most effective cooling pad to use with this laptop?

 

Hello all,
I recently got this laptop, and it is fantastic!

I plan to both put a SSD in, as well as relocate the HDD to the dvd drive location.

I plan to put the DVD drive in an external enclosure, but I am looking up the Matash!ta UJ8A7AS, and I cannot find its dimensions anywhere!

The enclosures are either 9.5 or 12.7mm, but I'm not sure what size our drive is. Even though 9.5 fits into the bigger one, I'd hate to get the 12.7mm case if it could have been slimmer.

Thanks for any help!

 

where did you buy the second laptop?

 

Hey guys, I'm trying to purchase this laptop. I noticed that both Tigerdirect.com and Bestbuy.com are selling the laptop for $1399.99, but Amazon.com has it for $1499.99. I'm not sure this is the right place to post, but could other potential buyers and non-buyers alike visit Amazon.com and submit a "Tell us about a lower price"?

Samsung Series 7 on Amazon.com

Also, I just viewed Paul's video and saw how he removed the back plate by undoing plastic clips. Did anyone break any clips doing that? I'm only asking because I remember breaking one of those plastic clips while disassembling a Dell laptop back in the day.

 

Tigerdirect, bestbuy & others will include tax on order page. Which will be something over $100 depending on states.

Cheapest is from Newegg, but they stock out very soon
Newegg.com - SAMSUNG NP700Z7C-S01US Notebook 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 3615QM(2.30GHz) ,17.3", 8GB Memory, 1TB HDD with ExpressCache Technology 8GB, DVD Super Multi, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M, Intel WiDi, JBL 3 speakers with sub-woofer

I have already placed my order at Amazon & waiting for mine. Hopefully it will arrive in the next couple of days.

 

Actually, Tigerdirect doesn't charge me any tax. I live in California. I believe Tigerdirect only charges tax to New Yorkers and maybe New Jersey. I'd rather deal with Amazon just because they have fantastic customer service should anything be defective with the laptop.

I looked at this laptop yesterday at BestBuy but didn't buy it, thinking I would buy it on Amazon sans tax. It's such a nice laptop, and out of the 5-6 displays that they had out, I liked this laptop's touchpad the best.

 

The first one had an slightly deformed n key (almost like a bulge at one side), so it was harder to press down than it should.

 

Samsung 17.3" bærbar PC NP700Z7C - Lefdal

Here, first one I bought from komplett.no Both were manufactured in March.

 

Maybe there's a better deal out there, but I just thought I'd share a good deal on this laptop:

So I took the plunge and ordered from Tigerdirect.com. $1399.99, no tax and free shipping. Fatwallet (a cashback site) will also give me 6% of $1399.99, which would be about $84. In the end, the total will come out to be ~$1320.

 

WEI score doesn't really mean much.

But for whatever it's worth:

CPU: 7.6
Memory: 7.9
Graphics: 6.8
Gaming graphics: 6.8
HDD: 5.9

 

For reasons unknown I can now run diablo 3 at max with 50fps+ with FullHD resolution. That's something I was unable to do with my first 700Z7C. Also lag due to HDD working is at a minimum.

 

TigerDirect also charge tax in Texas, they charge tax in what ever state they have a warehouse in.

 

I ask Paul the same thing earlier in the thread, and he said he didn't break any of the plastic tabs.

 

Hi just got this laptop last Wednesday. I did a clean install and downloaded the latest drivers including the nvidia 301 drivers for the 650m.

I installed Crysis from Steam to test the true beauty of this machine but it keeps crashing and I get the message "display driver has stopped working and has recovered". I looked up the problem and seems like some games are incompatible with the latest nvidia cards.

Keep in mind i can ran other games such as Need for Speed and Fallout without problems.

My question is has anyone else successfully ran Crysis on the Samsung and if you did a clean install or not Thank You!

 

Hey guys. I too got this machine the other day, and the only thing that doesn't work is Ubuntu. 99% of it does - everything shows up, and I can even see that it's hardware accelerated. But after the OS loads my screen looks like this:



Now the computer works fine in Windows and the BIOS, so the display itself is ok. I just can't get Ubuntu to render properly. Haven't tried bumblebee though because I don't believe it would affect the HD 4000 that I think it's trying to use. I wanted to search this thread so I wouldn't have to bother anyone, but the feature seems to be broken telling me no results for "invalid_search_query" when I try to look up ubuntu. So I thought I'd ask if someone else here had a similar problem.


Ninja Edit: Fun fact, switching the screen resolution to something lower, then reverting it fixes the issue. That's going to be a PITA to remember.

 

Can anyone confirm that it is possible to install to an SSD and then install back to the original HDD? Are there any muck-ups with the integrated 8gb cache?

 

I'm getting max 80 degrees Celsius on my CPU and 67C on my GPU when under load, is this the norm for you guys too?

 

Yup pretty normal. I get around 77 degrees C for CPU and GPU when gaming. Then it instantly cool down when I finished.

 

Thanks, and this won't hurt the longevity of the overall laptop?

 

Hello every one.
I'll be in houston next week for only one day and I was planning to buy this lappy from best buy store. But when I looked on their website they are all sold out. Now is there any other place in houston where It could be sitting on the shelf? Otherwise I'm looking at np900x4c. Thanks for reply.