Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Budget AMD Ultrabook

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Lawrence Lee
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Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Budget AMD Ultrabook

Post by Lawrence Lee » Mon Jan 27, 2014 3:00 pm


andyb
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Re: Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Budget AMD Ultrabook

Post by andyb » Wed Jan 29, 2014 4:44 pm

Not sure if this helps at all, but I recently had the chance to play with an ATIV Book 7 (Intel i7 model), and in some ways was thoroughly impressed, in others barely.

First and foremost, lets get W8 out of the way, I detest W8 in ways that most people cannot imagine, if your the same head straight to ninite.com (no www.) and install all of your favourite apps, utilities, anti-malware, antivirus etc, and also tick the box that says "classic start", wiith this and a re-boot you can make the laptop actually usable. However I had a touchscreen that cannot (to my knowledge be disabled).

Another point (only if you detest W8), disable the "side-swipe" touchpad options as they will drive you mad when you do anything with the touch-pad and don't start inside the edges of the pad, whoever thought this was a good idea should have their balls cut off while they are conscious and fed to them :twisted:

The screen on this £1,000 model was 1920x1080 and on a 13.3" screen too small for someone who loves lots of pixels, setting the "Display" to 125% fixed this, although many people may want to go to 150% (model and resolution to be taken into account). The screen was pretty damned good although a little over-bright, it had wide viewing angles and looked very crisp.

Apart from W8 on the laptop my main complaint was the SSD, My original 64GB Sandforce SSD totally outperformed this laptop in every way.... saying this, I cant compare the CPU performance difference between this laptops i7 and at the time my desktops Quad core AMD 3ish GHz chip.... again, I was actually surprised and saddened at how slow this laptop was to do ordinary disk-based tasks such as open a browser (8GB of RAM wasn't the issue) so the SSD must have been lame, I sadly never got the chance to benchmark the SSD.

Due to the size of the laptop, there was no 1.8" or 2.5" HDD option and a DVD drive was out of the question, so all other forms of storage must be USB, the line between a "chromebook" and an "ultrabook" is thinning fast due to cost and lack of storage on the ultrabook.

I would love to see a direct comparison of a comparably priced "Chromebook" and "Ultrabook". I have nothing against "Ultrabooks" except what I have listed above, and have not yet had the chance to actually use a "Chromebook" so I have no dog in this race.


Andy

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Re: Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Budget AMD Ultrabook

Post by torp » Wed Jan 29, 2014 9:45 pm

AMD Jaguar is the Atom competitor right? It has nothing to do with the decently performing APUs called A8 and A10?
Their lineup is becoming as confusing as Intel's :)

Jay_S
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Re: Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Budget AMD Ultrabook

Post by Jay_S » Thu Jan 30, 2014 9:17 am

From the article: "One of Intel's new Bay Trail Atoms perhaps would be a more appropriate match." PC Perspective has much more to say about this in their Intel Atom Z3000 Series Review.

They compare Intel's Z3770 Bay Trail with AMD's A4-1250 Temash. Not exactly a fair fight, but the author admits that the A4-1250 was the only Temash CPU he had on hand. The A4-1250 can't compare with the A6-1450 in the reviewed Samsung ATIV Book 9.

Code: Select all

Model     GPU       CPU Clock (Max/ Base)    CPU Cores   TDP     GPU Clock (Max/ Base)

Z3770     Intel HD  2.39GHz /1.46GHz         4           2W SDP  667MHz /311MHz

A6-1450   HD8250    1.4GHz /1.0GHz           4           8W      400MHz /300MHz

A4-1250   HD8210    1.0GHz                   2           8W      300MHz
From my experience with it, I am not a fan of Windows 8. I certainly don't want it on my next laptop. Although I have not used a Win8 tablet or convertible, they seem like a much better fit for Win8. Something like the Asus "Transformer Book" T100 (Bay Trail Z3740) is roughly half the price of the Samsung ATIV Book 9 ($339 at Office Depot, of all places!). Compared to the Samsung reviewed, The T100 gives up some storage space but gains an IPS screen and possibly battery life. I wonder what productivity sacrifices are made moving from a real laptop to something like the T100. It includes MS Office home/student, which adds a lot of value for those who need/want Office.

I am in the market for a 10-11" laptop and have high hopes for Bay Trail. I need something with a lot of battery life, an OK keyboard, an IPS screen (768p is fine at 11"), and linux compatibility (the T100 basically fails this last condition...). Of course I'm lusting for the Haswell MacBook Air, just not the price tag!

Sonic
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Re: Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Budget AMD Ultrabook

Post by Sonic » Fri Jan 31, 2014 3:21 am

Lawrence, thanks for this article (and all your others). I appreciated the photos shot against an outdoor background.

ceraf
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Re: Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Budget AMD Ultrabook

Post by ceraf » Mon Feb 03, 2014 10:45 am

torp wrote:AMD Jaguar is the Atom competitor right? It has nothing to do with the decently performing APUs called A8 and A10?
Their lineup is becoming as confusing as Intel's :)
Yeah, you're right =)

AMD's performance line of APUs (Trinity, Richland) use the A4, A6, A8, and A10 names. AMD's low power APUs (Kabini/Temash) use the A4, A6, E1, and E2 names. Not sure why AMD decided to overlap, but it's pretty confusing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AM ... processors

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