Samsung Series 7 Laptops - 15.0" and 15.6" Models (NP700Z4 & NP700Z5)

can you give me your e-mail. I want to cantact you or just write to me: grobar4o@hotm*il.com

 

I was really set on getting the Series 7 S03. I was seriously about to enter my delivery details on JR. However, all these forum posts I've read about the GPU failing on most people have made me decide to temporarily hold off my purchase. Sad to see Samsung fail so much on customer service and releasing a decent product given the much anticipated wait and the delay they put us through.

It seems that they have skimped on perfecting the track pad (it truly is a worthless piece of hardware, as attested by that previous post with a youtube link). In addition, Samsung is still very unfamiliar with programming their machines to operate perfectly out of the box. After all, Samsung is focusing more on the mobile phone and television SBUs (strategic business units) and less on their notebook division. I bet their R&D and programing departments are scratching their heads by now wondering how to respond to all these customer complaints.

It is indeed uncommon for notebooks to experience problems running high resolution Youtube videos, and even causing BSODs from doing so. Also, a "switchable" graphics card is meant to detect when the PC is in game or high-process work. Apparently, the ATI card they put in this notebook can't identify if your tasks are highly demanding or not. People can't even play a decent game on this stupid machine; probably just Solitaire or the like.

Anyways, if anyone has any saving comments for this notebook, I'd truly appreciate to hear anything positive that can possibly sway me back to purchasing it. I've read enough reviews and comments to see that the battery life and express cache are good selling points of this machine so please spare me from those.

Is Samsung actually releasing updates to remedy the BSOD and switchable graphics problems?

 

Had never BSODs or any problems with switchable graphics. No matter if using Flash on Firefox or IE.
Switching for games worked too.

And yes the driver recognizes graphic intense tasks, sometimes you have to say whether it shall use the Ati card or not. But you have to do that only once for a program.

 

It doesn't work always. My experience is that it works for everything but OpenGL applications. I still haven't found a way to get Minecraft running on the ATI card. And playing Minecraft on the Intel card is just not fun because the game runs at 10 FPS

Even if you tell it to run Minecraft in "High Perfomance" mode, it just doesn't do it. It has the same problem with FurMark, which uses OpenGL too. That's why I think it just doesn't work with OpenGL applications.

It's probably a driver issue, but there is no fix yet. At least I wasn't able to find anything.

 

I don't play minecraft, but furmark seems to work.
It says Intel HD graphics, but I don't think its capable of 29fps average in native resolution....

 

That's weird. I have tried FurMark versions 1.8.2 (9 FPS) and 1.9.1 (4 FPS), it didn't work in both versions. I have also downloaded MSI Afterburner to check the GPU usage of the ATI card, it was at 0% all the time.

Why does it not work for me? Do I have to do anything else besides changing this to "High Performance"?

 

You could try the new 11.11 driver^^

From here, Samsung drivers are so oldschool...

 

Ok guys, I've been documenting myself for the past few days/weeks to buy a new PC and found the Samsung 700Z5A-S03 to be a perfect fit (backlit keyboard, lightweight, decent gaming performance, good battery life)...


...but from what I can see here there seems to be a LOT of problems with this laptop. Is it a nice buy? Will I regret it? Are there any alternatives?

 

Yes. Who knows.... Not really

 

Yes, this works. Thanks man, you are awesome!

 

the problem that seems like the worst to me is the GPU switching... Is it really that big of a deal? I don't wanna struggle just to play games or watch YouTube videos

 

Youtube video would be fine that depends on your CPU and internet.
Games is well I haven't had any problems in SC2. But I would recommend only play any game on low settings anyways, it gets way too hot inside. Use HWMoniter to keep track of all your temperatures.
I was able to play fine on SC2 high settings but it reached 70-80 degrees or 158 to 176 F which is seriously dangerous for your hardware.

 

No, it's not. Either a lot of reviewers are blind as bats or else there is considerable variance in screen quality for the initial production run. The reports do not differ slightly as one would expect of subjective judgments. Rather, they differ *so extremely much* that variance is the more plausible explanation.

Variance means difference. The "objective benchmark" you like so much tells us only about the screen on that particular machine. Until they achieve adequate production QA, those results can be *completely meaningless* about the screen on a supposedly identical model.

Let's let the production pipeline fill up with units Samsung is happy with, and then see what folks say about the screen. The fact that the pipeline is so slow may indicate that they are not yet satisfied with what is coming off the line.

 

I plan on playing games like Dota 2 or Diablo 3, should I expect much overheating? That would suck tbh :/

 

@Ganxxta
Hey did yours came with vga adapter? am really losing all patience I have tring to get one, I wonder if you mind taking upclose picture of the adapter perhaps i could find one?

 

Yes mine came with it.
On the adapter is following number: AA-AV1N12B maybe this can help you.

 

Thanks! Exactly what i wanted to know, and I have placed order for this item here in us but nobody has it in stock... so am probably waiting another 3 weeks or even more ...

 

Hii ... Mine also came with VGA adapter ... by the ways i am really impressed by the battery life .... Its too good ... screen is looking good on my hand .... except for some small heating .. m loving it ..

 

Hmmm, I wish the american one came with a vga adaptor. Oh well. Skyrim and this laptop for christmas hopefully. Its gonna be awesome.

 

Dota 2 should be perfectly fine. Diablo 3 should also be fine since it not exactly really graphic intense like Crysis or BF3.

 

I had some problems with the display crashing while playing some youtube videos too... It seems the AMD drivers aren't so great at automatic switching, causing the video to freeze, turn green, or crashing altogether. I was able to work around this by going to the AMD properties and assigning firefox and flash plug ins to power saving (Intel HD) mode. Likewise, you can assign more graphic intensive apps like games to high performance (AMD) mode. You only have to assign it once, so it's not that big a deal.

 

Yeah unfortunately AMD drviers are still far away to be as good as Nvidia.

 

So it seems that according to some user impressions there is substantial heating problem. After how long did the critical temperatures appeared? Would a vented tray help with it?

 

I had a laptop on which I gamed at 90-95°C for three years no prob on hardware, I think 100°C is the proper limit for GPU's & Intel CPU's

 

My current laptop runs on average aroung 65 degree celcuis, and is still working for several years now.

It's a lenovo x60 tablet

 

Has anyone tried Skyrim on this laptop? Is it playable?

 

@ Mark838 and others
of course it is annoying samsung didnt send an adapter for the US models.
but why dont you buy a simple hdmi<->dvi adapter?
it is cheap and way better than vga.

 

A few pages back somebody said they could play it on medium/high with no issues.

 

I explained this here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/624864-samsung-series-7-6750m-benchmarks.html

 

Maybe they don't have either on their monitor/projector/TV...

 

Exactly.
If the temps are getting to high it starts throttling anyway, I think so 95-100°C+
So I wouldn't worry about overheating.

 

Thanks alot man! This really helps. Now I can finally play Minecraft. I wonder why AMD or Samsung are not capable of releasing such a driver. So to everyone who has problems with OpenGL games, get that driver!

 

Thanks man, I appreciate you taking the time to test and share all that.

 

Been following this topic for a few weeks, pretty sure I will be purchasing this before the years out.

Could anyone comment on this laptops ability to handle bf3?
I would also be using it for autocad and 3d design work and rendering + photoshop work.
Do you think this laptop will be up to the job?

Thanks to everyone who has allready posted info on their new toys !

edit: would you say the full i7 8gb 6750 setup is worth £100-£120 more then the i5 8gb 6750 setup?

 

isn't it only 6GB on the i5 version?

 

From what I have seen from other countries perhaps, in the UK we seem to have 4 maybe 5 different models.

highest spec i7

highest spec i5

 

It was just pulled from one of the major Swedish Retailers, just as the 14" chronus was pulled a few weeks ago. Wonder what's going on...

 

Vent tray would help or any type of notebook cooler. It just these heating problems are from the high intense gaming which is pretty maxing your settings in video gaming. It not exactly unexpected, it just well if you brought this laptop to do intense gaming then your kind of brought the wrong notebook. If you do light to moderate gaming this should be fine.

 

Has anyone successfully installed an Intel 6200 or Ultimate 6300 wireless adapter in this laptop?

 

Am already using hdmi port, I have two monitors set up one for emails one for everything else.

 

So what's the deal with discontinuation? I'm going to buy that laptop in few days, in Poland it comes with a sweet deal - 24' monitor for free. But I'm a bit worried about those rumours, I had some bad experiences with faulty laptops (XPS m1330).

Also, does the AMD graphics work well with AutoCAD in 3d?

 

great now my laptop is bsod...first the backlight doesnt work...i havent been able to send it in because i have had tests to take and i planned on sending it after thanksgiving(this sunday) and its bsod on me

 

No idea what's going on. But my guess is that there might perhaps be some really major flaws with the Chronus series, and if lucky they might re-release the whole series soon after it's updated.

Sadly it will prob be too late for me, and I have no real idea what to shop for now with both Samsung Series 7s being pulled and the Asus UX31 is far from as good as it should be...

Sony Vaio Z would be great, but cost a ton, so not an option sadly. Not sure about the Sony Vaio SB or any other alternatives atm.

 

I also really do not know about this laptop now. I don't see why they can't get them in stores and that makes me skeptical, but nothing else is ticking all the boxes. I want a small chassis, atleast a 6750mish graphics card and good battery life. Is it that hard?!?!?

 

As should be obvious by now, what's sometimes hard is ramping up production with items reliably meeting spec. It's the screen. In this thread alone, we not only have a wide range of experiences of the screen, we also have dissatisfied folks reporting opposite particular details, so even the problems are not consistent. We also know Samsung intended the screen to be a strong asset for this product, not a liability, and some of the reviews reported finding the screen to be excellent. Given all this, the company can't flood the pipeline with product until they get production constancy.

This kind of thing used to be completely normal. For example, it was considered very risky to buy a new car model during the first several months, if not the whole first year. With electronics, the Japanese figured out how to prevent it, but part of that was keeping their mouth shut about a product until they knew things were ironed out. Now, that's harder to do with all the scheduled pre-announcements and leaking of details. Hell, in this thread some people were freaking out about delay *before* there was any delay.

I'm guessing the only folks who seemed surprised (and freaked out) about this are so young that they don't remember more than a very few years. I don't know if the screens are being produced in a new facility, or if a new and inadequate QA regimen is being used, but it's gotta be something like that. I have yet to hear an alternate explanation that is even semi-plausible.

 

While what you say is true, this should still not be the issue today. The huge variance in these laptops are enough to turn me off from buying, and I need to buy soon. Hopefully somebody will come along with what I am looking for or Samsung can turn this around. Otherwise I'll be forced to make compromises I don't want to.

 

For those who may also be interested in the lower-end best buy model and live in the states, best buy is selling its model for $799 this Friday. I found it looking through its ad which can be found here:

Best Buy's Deals and Weekly Ad - Best Buy

I believe it's on page 10.

It's a really good deal in my opinion.

 

I read a lot about this laptop and I just wonder i it possible to upgrade the np700z5a with 2 x 8gb DDR3 1333? If anyone try it or plan to do it?

Is there a release date schedule for Canada... i'm bored to wait...

Thank

 

Is there a way to know for sure? I guess that a simple mortal like me can't just send an email and ask? I'm really hyped on that laptop, new Envy is too much of a MBP ripoff for me.

 

What about ENVY 15 which is about to be relaeased in two weeks? There have been some mentioning of it here, but you can find my thread about it here.