question about AMD Llano in NP305V5A

Hello, I have 2 Toshiba Laptops, both rock solid, however, there is a Samsung that caught my eye at BestBuy that I was considering. It is the NP305V5A-A04US SKU: 3603163 , 640gb HD, 6gig ram, and a AMD Llano A8-3510MX processor. My questions for you Samsung pros are these.....
1. Are Samsung's reliable? Do they use there own HD's?
2. The reviewers all say the speaker system is pretty impressive, what do you know?
3. AND Finally...the big issue.....I know the Trinity APU's are decent, what about this particular Llano? I don't want a small step up from the Turion 64x2 RM-74 2.2ghz I have now, I want a solid improvement...I think the 4gig L2 cache will improve cd ripping burn times....but what about everything else? Oh, I won't play any games on it, but will watch dvd's and such..............
thanks!
Oh, and tell me about Samsung laptops in general if you have something to offer! thanks again.

 

Good morning!
First off, samsung may or may not use their own hard drive. On this particular model I don't think they do.. To give you an exemple, my Samsung laptop uses a Hitachi drive.
For the speakers, I can't tell, I don't recall noticing a difference with this model.
As for the processor, the A8-3510MX is good, but it is a first gen llano, they are clocked slower and have a weaker gpu than the second generation..
Overall though it is a pretty decent computer, and you should be able to grab one for a ridiculously low price; if it is the case don't hesitate.

 

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it.
the price is $559
Hitachi HDs are really good.....that would be fine with me...
I know the Trinity has a better processor part of the APU.....I just want to b sure the gap between Turion 64x2 and Llano is big enough....what do you think on that?

 

The price is still high, you could get a better spec-ed one in FutureShop (canada) for $479.
The difference in speed is more than enough, the 3510MX performs more than twice as fast as a turion.
Regarding the price, I think you could get something more powerful for that price, you might want to do some more shopping.

 

By the way, Samsung sold their HDD business to Seagate last year. HDDs are still being sold with the Samsung name but the label says made by Seagate so it's unclear to me whether it is the Samsung or the Seagate design inside. In the past there was no certainty that a Samsung notebook would contain a Samsung HDD and this continues (also with SSDs).

John

 

The A8-3510MX can use 1600 RAM like Trinity and when overclocked it'll perform very much the same if not better than a Trinity CPU (Trinity cannot be overclock, only under-volted). Sorry I cannot provide any links right now but at stock clocks and voltages, Trinity does perform better than Llano. Trinity provides better battery life, especially when the APU is at idle and the iGPU is better too. It would really depend on the price of the notebooks you're looking at.

I remember seeing a sale on Futureshop for a 14" Samsung with the A10-4600M + 7670M for $550. It was a good deal.

 

Wow, thanks for your tips. I will keep my eye open for a good deal that's for sure.......Do you know anything about Samsung reliability?
I here, or at least read, that Samsung is a "tough" company to work for, they strive for high quality...which make me think they assemble their own laptops and they are pretty well built..

 

It's tough to say because the only Samsung products I've personally had are the Samsung 830 & 470 SSDs & a notebook DDR3 RAM stick. They haven't failed me yet and their SSD's I recommend to anyone looking for a bulletproof SSD. In general they make reliable/quality made products. But, nothing's perfect and even some of the best guys make mistakes or have faulty products in their production runs. Samsung however is a really LARGE company and they make a lot of different things. I'd say they're pretty reliable; other companies use them in their own products such as Apple.

Maybe some Samsung notebook owners will chime in with their experiences?