Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US)

You can get your software , music , and movies from the cloud , but there are also many people who install the program from the disc anyway; rip CDs from, well , the CD ; and watch DVDs on the plane . Samsung has deals for this year : Bring your averageultrabook . Add 1 pound weight of it, bringing it to a still eminently portable 3.9 pounds . Subtract $ 100 from its price , bringing it to $ 899.99 list . Elements of a 14 - rather than the 13.3 - inch screen , a roomy hybrid hard drive instead of a solid - state drives , and the onboard optical drive is missing almost every other ultrabook . Presto : You have Series 5 Ultra ( NP530U4B - A01US ) , an affordable alternative to the super - thin , super - Elite Series 9 - or , for that matter , the 14 - inch , no - optical drive HP Envy 14 Spectre Samsung 's ( $ 1,399.99 direct , 4 stars ) .

DVD ± RW drive and its full range of ports , the NP530U4B - A01US split the difference between Ultrabooks like the Dell XPS 13 ( $ 999.99 direct , 4 stars ) and ultraportables like the Toshiba Portege R835 Choice - P50X editors ' ( $ 888.99 list , 4.5 stars ) . It also requires a model - as a microscope to distinguish from NP530U3B - A01US , a 13.3 - inch ultrabook with no optical drive .

Design
0.8 by 13.1 by 9.0 inches ( HWD ) , the Series 5 Ultra is fractionally larger than the 13.3 - inch Ultrabooks and fractionally smaller than 14 - inch laptop like the Lenovo IdeaPad U400 ( $ 899.99 direct , 4 stars ) . It sports an elegant silver - gray aluminum lid and palm rest flat black chiclet - style keyboard .

The keyboard is not backlit , but has a comfortable if somewhat shallow typing feel with exemplary layout includes dedicated , full - sized Home , End , PgUp , and PgDn keys . The large touchpad is also dedicated left and right mouse buttons instead of just clicked corners , which makes it a pleasure to use .

The Series 5 Ultra 14 - inch display has the same 1366 by 768 resolution you can see the entire segment ultrabook . It was good bright ( 300 nits ) , with a non - reflective matte finish and average viewing angles , and showed minimal flex without feeling fragile our grasp -by - the - corner test . Two dinky speakers above the keyboard provide a sufficiently strong and clear audio , if not booming bass .

Features
Oddly , our unit 802.11n Wi - Fi test will not work out of the box , without reporting the wireless networks within range even when we press Fn - F12 convenient wireless control panel for Samsung to make sure that it will move on. We used the system restore function to restore the Series 5 Ultra factory defaults , which then , Wi-Fi worked fine . Other functions include wireless Bluetooth and Intel Wireless Display ( WiDi ) for streaming sound on a screen and put $ 100 - or - Belkin or Netgear adapter capable HDTV set .

Alongside the DVD tray - load ± RW drive on the right side of the Samsung is a USB 2.0 port and SD / MMC memory - card slot . On the left is Ethernet , VGA , and HDMI ports : a headphone / microphone jack , and two USB 3.0 ports .

Series 5 Ultra combines storage system with a 500GB hard drive ( 420GB free ) with a 16GB solid - state drives dubbed Express Cache . The latter does not appear as a drive letter or partition , but is used to speed up the booting and resume from sleep, we stopwatched approximately 34 and 3 seconds respectively .


Supports Samsung 's Series 5 Ultra with one-year warranty . In addition to Windows 7 Home Premium , its preloaded software includes a 60 - day trial of Norton Internet Security , the kudzu - like WildTangent games , and a handful of utility Samsung - brand from Easy Settings ( a friendly alternative to digging through the Windows control panel ) on a Mac OS Dock - like ( or Windows Taskbar - like ) launcher program .