Samsung RF511 all-purpose laptop

This 15.6in laptop can be used for gaming as well as tough multimedia tasks and day-to-day office work

Good Gear Guide

Need a laptop that can be used for entertainment purposes as well as boring old office work? If so, the Samsung RF511 is a good choice. Its specification list is beefy: it includes one of Intel's latest Intel Core i7 CPUs as well as plenty of memory and hard drive space. Most importantly, it has a good graphics adapter, and a good graphics adapter is what's needed to play games.

Pros

  • Plenty of speed
  • Great keyboard
  • Blu-ray drive

Cons

  • Screen too glossy
  • Build quality not great

Bottom Line

Samsung's RF511 is relatively inexpensive, yet it packs a lot of speed and good features. For just over $1000 (if you shop around), you get an Intel Core i7 CPU as well as a Blu-ray drive. We think it's a great laptop for anyone who wants to be entertained as well as do serious work.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 1,299.00 (AUD)

We had no problems running popular games on this laptop and unless you're a hardcore gamer who wants to enable all of the eye candy available in a game and still experience smooth gameplay, then we think you'll be happy with it. It recorded 9219 in 3DMark06, which is a good result, and games such as Left4Dead2 recorded 60 frames per second, which equates to smooth gameplay.

If you want to just do spreadsheets, create documents and browse the Web, the Samsung won't let you down. In fact, if that's all you want to do, then you're better off buying something much cheaper and less powerful. The Samsung's specifications are better suited to those of you who want to edit video and to convert files from one format to another.

You can also use this laptop for heavy multitasking. Its CPU has four cores and Hyper-Threading and there is 6GB of RAM available. What this means is that you can run up to eight programs (or more) simultaneously without noticing too much of a slow-down in performance. The hard drive has a capacity of 750GB, which is great for storing stacks of multimedia files as well as all your programs, and because the laptop has USB 3.0, you can plug in a fast external hard drive to back up all your data, too.

Some things we don't like about this laptop are its 15.6in glossy screen and somewhat questionable build quality. That said, it's not too bad and it's not an expensive laptop, so you shouldn't expect it to be perfect in every way.

We like its keyboard, which feels great to type on and its touchpad is smooth and supportive of multi-finger gestures. It's a big laptop that weighs about 2.6kg, so it's not great for actually using it on your lap — it definitely should be considered a desktop replacement unit.

All up, this notebook is hard to pass up if you want a good combination of speed, features, price and user comfort.

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