Samsung RV720 is selling at resonable price, impressive budget 17-inch laptop, cheerful and just a little chunky and step up from the usual desktop replacement - but perhaps not the powerhouse you might imagine from a notebook this size. It costs less than £500, which is pretty good for a home-based laptop.
Design
The RV720 has a certain amount of style, the chassis is a metallic grey plastic but there's no flex on the keyboard and little on the screen. The grooved texture on the lid adds some visual interest as well as making it easier to grip, which does matter with something this large. The drawback is that the grooves also collect dirt. The darker stripe at the base of the lid is echoed by the glossy black plastic background on the keyboard which slopes down to form a shallow well, although this doesn't match the matte keys.
The Laptop comes with twin speakers, which are widely-spaced and the speaker grille pattern continues across the width of the chassis until it reaches the large power button. The screen covers the back of the laptop when it's open, but instead of dropped hinges there are two chunky projecting hinges.
The Laptop has a large screen, probably that why is a little top heavy; although at 2.6kg it's not too bad for most 17-inch models. The size means that all the ports and connections are arranged conveniently down the sides, but it's a budget selection.
Keyboard, trackpad and connectivity
The RV720 has an isolated keyboard with Samsung's trademark, slightly rounded, keytops. They’re well-spaced and have a reasonable amount of travel, although they're on the noisy side when you're typing at speed. The shiny black background is stylish, but a little distracting. Although there are large gaps at either side of the keyboard but no extra space between the main keys and the numeric keyboard and no dedicated media control keys.
Connectivity
The power connection is on the left, Gigabit ethernet, two USB ports, both VGA and HDMI, separate audio and microphone jacks and a SDXC slot. On the right is the DVD rewriter and another USB 2 port; there's no Blu-ray and no USB 3, you do get Bluetooth 3 as well as 802.11 N Wi-Fi.
Power Room
The Sandy Bridge Core i3 is a huge step up from an Atom, but with only two cores and no hyperthreading or TurboBoost, which you will get a reasonable performance for mainstream computing tasks and multimedia, not good enough for a gaming or a video workstation.
The audio quality is good enough, although the volume is a little low. However there's no distortion, even at high volumes and detail in music is crisp and clear and both the treble and mid-range are strong.
Storage
The 4GB of RAM is welcome and the 750GB hard drive is good for the price.
The Display
The Laptop has a resonable display, text is clear but could be crisper and colours are accurate, but could be more vibrant - even with the automatic enhancements when you play a video. Contrast is reasonable, in darker areas and very much affected by viewing angles.
Because of the extremely glossy screen means reflections are more of a problem than the poor viewing angles for finding the right screen position. Frame rates in anything but casual games are disappointing. And while the Intel HD video is perfectly capable of streaming 1080p video online and our usual 720p test video over the local network. 1600 by 900 is an adequate resolution for a 17-inch screen, but doesn't compare to 1920 by 1080, and that's reflected in the price of the RV720.
Samsung has the notebook set to sleep rather than hibernate, with the default Samsung power profile, hibernation is completely disabled.
Battery
The RV720 kept running for 45 minutes after giving us power warnings and with Wi-Fi on we saw three hours of battery life for a mix of streaming music and video, browsing the Web continuously and editing documents. Turn off Wi-Fi and dim the screen and you can get four and a half hours.
Software
The Laptop comes with Office Start, Windows Live, Skype and the ever-intrusive Norton Internet Security and Online Backup, bundles software includes CyberLink MediaSuite for burning DVDs and YouCam for driving the below average quality webcam.
Few low-quality games and a slew of Samsung utilities with no unifying interface other than a program group in the Start menu.
Conclusion
The RV720 is very good price, although is missing some features, but there aren't many 17-inch Core i3 systems that can match the RV720 for build quality with this low a pricetag.
Online Shops
| Relative | Seller Rating | Condition | Delivery | Total Price From |
Amazon.co.uk |
5 | New | Free | From £496.96 |
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