Samsung 15" Series 9 NP900X4C with Ivy Bridge CPU

The crux of the issue, nicely put.

I was curious what other people would consider if their requirement, as mine is, was to have at least a 15" screen, and also the lightest weight possible, aside from the X4C?

The one that comes to mind for me would be a refresh of the Sony SE, but am I missing any? Thanks

(Sort of off topic? If so, I will edit this out)

 

I'm in the UK, the only 15" model available here at the moment is the NP900X4C-A01, with 128 GB SSD (SanDisk....grrr).

 

They pulled that stunt with the Sandisk on John. If I order and receive a machine with one, it will be returned. Samsung has no excuse for putting those in their most expensive machines.

Apple is supposedly announcing machines next week. Dell is supposed to reveal the XPS 14 and 15 Ultrabooks the week after.

Then there's the 14" Lenovo X1 Carbon.

That is what comes to mind right now. By Christmas I suspect you'll have many more 15" options.

 

The Samsung S9 is by far the smallest/lightest 15" laptop I know. The Sony SE is a full pound heavier, although it has an even bigger screen, optical drive, and dedicated graphics. It's quite light for packing that extra hardware. Unfortunately, the SE's otherwise lovely FHD IPS screen has the same red-->orange display problem as the HP Envy 15, which looks like it will persist through the ivy bridge upgrade. Everything has a compromise. :/

 

Hmm the more I use it, the more I think I should return it. It's nice, don't get me wrong, but SQL runs slower than on my 3 year old Latitude (although I expect this is due to the Dell's superior SSD). I can't help but think it's not worth the price I paid. In my opinion it should be about £400 less (ie: £800 not £1200).

I had my doubts before buying it, being particularly fussy about performance and ergonomics above all else. The Sammy wins hands down on style but it doesn't feel as nice to use as my Latitude - I guess that's because the Dell was built to work at for 8 hours a day, whereas the Sammy is built to watch a film or surf the odd web page for no more than 2-3 hours a day.

Decisions, descisions....

 

Yeah, the other WEI score that has been posted earlier in this thread looked a lot better (perfect disk score, 7.9).

My A03US is scheduled to come in on Monday. Quick question on this: My standard approach is to always make a disk image of the virgin machine, before the first boot into Windows. What key(s) does Samsung use to interrupt after POST in order to choose booting from an external device (Flash Drive in this case), or going into the BIOS? This is the first Sammy I ever touched...

 

Gutted. I would also be getting a UK model.

If the X1 Carbon is not stupidly expensive and you can add more than 4GB RAM I will get that instead.

What is with ultrabook manufacturers that don't get the basics?? HD+ or better screen, reasonable quality, 8GB Ram (or more), ok keyboard. That's all I want! 8GB Ram is the main limiting factor... so few offer it.

May still get the 900X4C and live with its limitations; planning on remoting to my server farm a lot of the time anyway so absolute performance is not a major issue.

 

Right - decision time, keep or return...?

By the way, the WEI posted earlier is the 256GB Samsung SSD, mine has the lame 128GB SanDisk SSD.

Think I'm sending it back. To be honest, the notebook itself is ok, as is the processor but this SSD is cripplingly slow. I know I could spend £150 on a faster one, but frankly after spending £1250 on the laptop it's ridiculous.

 

Is it mSATA? Does anybody know of a 256GB drive that can be bought independently?

 

you can, but as I said - why should I? I paid more than enough for this thing as it is, it SHOULD NOT need an upgrade out of the box, FFS!

 

Mushkin has a 240GB mSATA on the market. Crucial is supposed to be releasing their 256GB M4 next week but is will likely be north of $300 USD.

By the time you replace the current mSATA with today's prices, you are right back to the A03 price.

 

Agree 100%, should not need any upgrades at the price, was just wondering if it was possible (I have an 80GB mSATA boot drive in my W520 but couldn't find much bigger at the time of purchase.. never seen a 256GB mSATA SSD on the open market)

No A03 in UK or that would also be problem solved

 

not so much the capacity, but the pi$$ poor performance of the one they fitted as standard. Why, when they make the best SSDs on the market do they fit a poxy SanDisk?!?

 

Agreed, doesn't make sense. However I was thinking of upgrading anyway - increase capacity and performance, doesn't mean it's right, but there are not many other options that tick the right boxes for me.

 

So not only does the UK get screwed on price they get screwed on slower parts!!!

X1 carbon is looking better for me now although I've been waiting for this Samsung to be released for months

 

For the same reason they put mini VGA on the darn thing instead of mini DisplayPort.

Poor decisions.

The search for the perfect notebook continues...

 

Slightly off-topic, apologies, but in the UK the out-going Vaio Z may meet your requirements if the 900X4C doesn't - it's dramatically reduced, even with 1080p screen and quad-core i7. Am tempted..

Z Series : VAIO & computing : Sony

It may "only" be Sandy Bridge, but really, that processor should beat any of the Ivy Bridge i5 offerings.

 

I did consider it before I bought the S9, but the VAIO has an awful keyboard and a flimsy screen that bends like mad. I am going to sleep on it, I may well keep it - if I can just get the WEI rating for the SSD from 6.0 (which is frankly a HDD rating!) to 7.5 or above. Maybe a firmware update or something might help. Failing that, I might live with it for a few months then buy an upgrade and maybe recoup the costs by selling the SanDisk on eBay.

 

First post but hopefully useful...

I received my machine today (UK) and have been playing around with it for most of the afternoon tweaking various bits and pieces (mainly to reduce the standard Windows install size) having found a few good optimization guides.

I didn't run the WEI rating until this evening following all of these updates and tweaks and the score for my HD came out at 7.5... not sure if it has anything to do with the things I have done (tweaking page file, removing hibernation files among others) but thought it might be good to know that it appears possible to get a decent score for the Sandisk drive.

Out of interest how did the rest of the WEI scores comes out?

Cheers.

 

From memory, CPU was 6.9 and RAM was 7.2 I think. Going to bed now, will post full scores tomorrow. I might blow away the recovery crud and possibly do a clean install. 6.0 is seriously low for an SSD. Thanks.


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Agreed.

WHAT??? Mine got 7.9 (256gb model). You see my CrystalDiskMark scores? Similar to your own?

Oh, now I see why - mine is the Samsung model. This system is crazy fast to me, but I'm very accustomed to my latitude D630.

BIOS is F2

The A03US is not available to CowboyCoder in the UK. Were I him, I'd keep and upgrade, but I have the funds to do it and don't care about price as long as I get something I like. I love this thing.

 

7.5 is the same score as for the Sandisk SSD in my X3B. Getting a 6 means something isn't set up properly.

John

 

Sorry. I meant the 4B. But I'm assuming the 4B->4C will be the same display as is the 3B->3C. At least that's what it seems like judging by some of the feedback I'm seeing.

So I should say I saw both the 4B and 3B in person and the 4B didn't hold a candle to the 3B in my opinion. Again, I'm a graphic designer, so this is something very important to me. As is the screen resolution. After playing with the 3B in person, I was pretty set to purchase the 3C version for the Ivy Bridge chipset and hope the screen resolution would be increased to 1080p.

Instead, after a lot of researching I decided to go with the Asus Zenbook Prime. Between the measurements of black levels, white levels, color gamut, contrast, etc. it seems it's the winner over the Samsung. It's also a full 1080P display.

It has its drawbacks like using a (by today's standards) slow ssd. So I'm hoping I can grab the UX32VD version and swap the HDD in it to a good SSD. I'm waiting for the announcements for the new Macbooks and hopefully Lenovo X1 Carbon to get a better perspective before jumping on the Asus.

For those buying a Samsung laptop for the first time, I can say that I've had a Samsung QX410 for nearly 2 years and have been really impressed with its performance, reliability, and quality. That's the part that makes me want to get the S9. On the other hand, for the money, and considering the field I'm in, the Asus might be the winner.

 

That's what I was thinking. It has the correct, latest firmware. Nothing in the BIOS that would obviously affect disk performance. Launching apps is nothing special, certainly not as fast as the Intel X-25M that I have - and that's 2 years old now.

Any suggestions? Was tempted to do a clean install of Win7 but if I do that it makes a factory restore impossible then I wouldn't be able to return it if I decide to send it back.


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Woodpile, is the Series 9 you got the i7-3517u? I can't find it anywhere for sale, so I pre-ordered it. I am in the US.
Also, if it is the same model, you said you received the samsung ssd? and how is the screen? it's not pls is it? Thanks!

EDIT: I looked back and saw that you've already answered these questions!
To those looking at the new sony z series, is that screen ips? also, does anyone know which ssd's are used in it? Finally, has the build quality seemed good? cant find too much on it.

 

The Sony Z has an LED RGB display, which doesn't quite have the viewing angles of the Asus UX32VD or Samsung Series 9 13". The Z's screen actually covers 96% of Adobe RGB color though, not just full sRGB like the Asus, or the surprisingly only 60-70% sRGB coverage that the Samsung 13" PLS offers.

 

First run CrystaldiskMark and SiSoftware Sandra. WEI sometimes screws up. Three opinions are better than one.

Then it might be worth reinstalling only the Intel chipset driver in case that got corrupted.

You can do a clean Windows installation using the provided disc. First backup the system software using Samsung Recovery Solution. If you don't delete any of the partitions then there shouldn't be any problem with returning the machine. However, I would be tempted to contact Samsung support if all three disk benchmarks come up with poor results.

John

 

Thanks John, will post my results here later this evening for some comparisons.


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Downloaded and installed latest chipset driver, rebooted and re-ran Windows Index:

Processor: 6.9
Memory: 7.4
Aero Graphics: 6.4
Gaming Graphics: 6.4
Primary hard disk: 7.4

Much, much better - and I can live with it being 0.2 slower than the Intel SSD. Just launched SQL in 4 seconds dead, too - it was taking 15+ seconds last night.

Maybe it was still downloading Windows updates at the time or the reinstall of the Chipset did the trick? Who knows, either way I'm a happy bunny now.

Thanks all.

 

Glad to hear that it's been fixed. Perhaps the disk interface was stuck in a slow mode. A bit like the days when problems reading a CD could cause the HDD to drop into PIO mode.

I'm also interested by those WEI scores. It's telling me that Ivy Bridge gives a big boot to memory access but only a small boost to the gaming graphics yet the GPU includes several more pipelines. Or maybe that shows the limitations of WEI.

John

 

I suppose it's possible Microsoft hasn't adjusted it's baselines to reflect the new chipsets yet?


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Just ordered the NP900X4C-A03US from Amazon. It shows current availability of July 5th. Hopefully I'll receive sooner. I will report back any impressions.

 

I don't want to get your hopes up, but I order my NP900X4C-A03US on 6/3 and recieved this update yesterday:

Previous estimated arrival date: July 03, 2012 - July 17, 2012
New estimated arrival date: June 12, 2012

 

What version of Intel Rapid Storage driver do you use?

 

I had the Sandisk U100 128GB in my former ASUS UX31E. It scored 7.5 in WEI, but were extremely slow writing small files. (4k test in Crystal Mark and/or AS SSD benchmarks)
I switched my UX31E to the same model but with the XM11 SSD. MUCH quicker, and 7.9 in WEI too...

It's disappointing that Samsung use this U100 in their expensive computers...

 

Great news, and besides the 0.1 difference in the primary hard disk score I can report identical scores for my machine.

I'm still tempted to remove the Samsung Recovery Partition (and possibly do a clean install of Windows to recoup more space); as I backup all my files online (multiple services) is there any value in keeping it (especially as I'm more than comfortable starting from scratch from an OS perspective if needs be)?

Really enjoying this machine so far, I'm definitely appreciating the dedicated home, page up, page down, end keys which this keyboard has due to the additional space. The screen is pretty good in my opinion and the overall design and build of this thing is great, here's hoping it stands the test of time and plenty of use.

Looking forward to hanging around these forums and seeing how people get on with their machines and picking up some tips and tricks (already made good use of a few).

Cheers.

 

Hi Guys,

This is my first post having been reading this topic for the last week or so.

I have just received my NP900X4C-A01UK, and I also ordered the NP900X3B due to my indecision. I wanted to make sure I benefit from the 20% VAT back promotion that ended 2 days ago, but have still not made my mind up which one to go for.

This thread has been really informative, but the decision is still an absolute nightmare - may even end up tossing a coin to decide!!

The price difference was only £100 extra for the NP900X4C-A01UK and you get -

15" screen (preferable to me)
Ivy Bridge
4GB more Ram
Extra USB 3 port
Longer battery life

In contrast the NP900X3B loses out in a few areas, but -

The PLS screen - I am finding that hard to ignore.

Why couldn't they have put a PLS screen in the NP900X4C-A01UK, especially at that price point?

I am also really bothered by the lack of Displayport as I have a DELL U2711 with 2560 x 1440 resolution which I guess will be useless with either of these 2 premium laptops.

I guess there is never going to be a perfect laptop!

Hopefully I will make the right decision tomorrow.

Cheers

 

Version 11.0.0.1032

 

Any idea when the NP900X4C-A03 will arrive in Canada?

 

Not sure if this has been posted; if so I missed it. Good review:

Samsung 900X4C-A04DE - Notebookcheck.net External Reviews

Actually the main bit is in Deutsch but you can probably work it out:

http://www.notebookinfo.de/produkte/samsung-serie-9-900x4c-a04/np900x4c-a04de/00011086/#Tests

 

Are there any ultrabooks out there with displayports or output that can support a 2560x1440 or 1600 resolution external monitor?

 

Yes.

Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook. Presumably the XPS 14 and 15 Ultrabooks will too when they release.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

HP Spectre and Spectre XT

Apple MacBook Air

Now you see why it's so stupid that Samsung and ASUS put mini VGA on their models. Of all things, analog.

 

Has anybody tried one of these?

DisplayLink Store :: Adapters

USB 3.0 display adapters - I know it's frustrating needing another dongle... but could work?

 

post deleted by me...

 

Just to be sure I understand it correctly, can the (mini/micro) HDMI interface output at a resolution of 2560x1400 or is it limited to 1920x1080? Wikipedia says that HDMI 1.4 should do the trick, but it apperars otherwise here. What is the real limit?

Cheers

 

I used fast HDMI adapters and cables and only got to 1920x1080. I tested several.

 

I think I am going to delete the recovery partition to reclaim the 20GB but I'm not sure what the hibernation partition is for?

Can this be deleted too, without affecting the rapid resume from sleep and super-fast boot ups? I assume the partition is just a place for the hibernation file to be saved to rather than the root of C:

What are the implications of this?

 

just disable hibernation, saves a lot of room on the SSD. and minimize pagefile as well. it won't affect sleep, just disable hibernate as an option.

 

From what I understand the 'hibernation' partition is related to Intel Fast Start, there's a great post on this forum that explains how it works and how to set it up following a new install:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...00x4b-guide-intel-rapid-start-technology.html

Granted it's related to the earlier model but my assumption is that it also applies to the new one as it's essentially the same software.

Cheers.

 

Thanks, I'll keep the hibernation partition then as I use it all the time and it is obviously much quicker than the standard Windows hibernation process. I shall get rid of the recovery partition though - that will leave plenty of extra space for all my p0rn.

 

Just got back from Best Buy. Had the NP900X4C-A01US on hold, ready to pull the trigger. Went to back and they actually had one set up on display - was a bit surprised since the local Best Buy doesn't really 'stay on top of things'. Anyhow, I was immediately shocked at the display in comparison to the ASUS UX31E sitting next to it. The 4C was really washed out in comparison... I reduced brightness up/down and then begin the fiddling of getting the display at just the right tilt. At just the right angle, the display looks really good, but then glancing over; the ASUS looked way better - even at an angle!

Bummer. I was immediately deflated - but also relieved as well that I hadn't bought this thing sight unseen. Don't get me wrong - the Sammy is a work of art, impressive in pretty much everything else I looked at. It does have the dreaded SanDisk SSD, but pretty much everything else is amazing. Add me to the list of those that will be waiting on the updated ASUS line. IMHO, when Samsung gets 1080p IPS in a 15" ultrabook, it will be hard to beat.