Samsung Series 9: 11 inch vs 13 inch

Hey guys. First time posting here, but I've been reading the forum alot recently and got alot of valuable information

So I have been very interested in the new Samsung Series 9 and especially the 11 inch little brother, however I do have a few concerns and questions so I decided to turn to you guys for some advice. Basically I need a very portable machine with decent performance, good battery life and nice design Also love the great screen. There are some revies around for the 13 inch one and it seems like it's receiving alot good scores, but there are some key differences between the two models though. I'm writing this mainly from the perspective of the 11 inch one, since that's the one I'm thinking of purchasing.

1. Unlike the bigger version which is powered by i5 2537M, the 11 inch one is running on i3 380UM. Does anyone know what is the difference on performance and battery life between these two? Now I don't plan to do alot of heavy stuff or heavy gaming, just using it for school stuff, normal light use and occasional League of Legends game if possible

2. My other, perhaps the biggest, concern is the fact that in the 11 inch model there is only 2GB of DDR3 system memory(which is also the maximum). Is this gonna entirely cripple the experience?

3. 64 GB SSD. Would guess for some people it's a huge deal to have so little space for me it's not a big deal since I'm not planning to store alot of
stuff in it.

4. The official Samsung site lists both as having Intel HD Graphics 3000. I'm a little bit confused since I was under the impression that this feature is integrated on the new Sandy Bridge processors and although the 13 inch version has one, I'm not sure how the 11 inch version with slightly older i3 380UM is also listed as having the new graphics. I'm a little bit confused here so I'd appreciate if someone could clear this out for me

I really hope that these differences won't make the little brother a retard brother because I really like the small size and more reasonable price tag ($1199.99 vs $1649.99). Also hoping they have the same, bright and matte screen.

Any information and comments would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

Series 9 Notebook | Samsung Office Series 9 Notebook
Series 9 Notebook | Samsung Office Series 9 Notebook

 

Intel HD graphics only comes on a sandy bridge CPU, the 11" model comes with an arrandale. Just a guess here, but probably Samsung webpage is wrong.

 

The Sandy Bridge is called HD Graphics 3000 to differentiate it from the previous HD Graphics. The 380UM is Arrandale so it has the Intel HD HD Graphics. Perhaps Samsung have opted for the previous generation because of pricing considerations.

John

 

The graphics card used is the older Intel HD Graphics. Samsung probably messed up the Intel HD Graphics and Intel HD Graphics 3000 (which is exclusively only used on Sandy Bridge processors)

One side note: On the ultra low voltage versions of the processors (which is the case of the i3-380UM), the bundled Intel HD graphics will also be underclocked. Expect gaming performance to be horrible, as gaming on the standard voltage HD graphics is already bad, but you probably aren't looking for a gaming notebook after all. HD videos, on the other hand, should work though.

 

Thank you for replies guys.

It seems like the 11'' model is pretty weak overall with bad graphics, last generation processor and only 2 GB ram and on top of that the price is very high. Considering all of this I am very tempted to buy the macbook air base model which can be bought refurbished with 850 dollars. I'm not a big fan of Apple though and I really wanted to find good reasons to buy the Samsung but it seems like the macbook with an even older processor just provides more bang for the buck.

In the case of both machines I'm still concerned with the 2GB RAM. How limiting will this be for everyday activities and for light gaming, league of legends for example?

 

get the 13 inch, upgrade the ram to 8gb and u r all set

 

11" is just small btw. Go for the 13 inch.

 

Well I actually prefer the small size and if it had sandy bridge and more ram it would be a no brainer, especially since both have same resolution screen too. With the bigger model my main problem is the huge price. Has anyone seem any reviews or other new info of the 11"model? I tried googling but its almost like there is no info on it since it was revealed a few months ago.

 

Speaking of the differences between the two machines, does anyone know the physical dimensions of the touchpads on the 2 of them. I'm a heavy touchpad user (coming from a MacBook Pro) and want the 11 inch Series 9 but if the touchpad is smaller on it than the 13 inch that may change my decision.

 

Hey guys,

I'm also weighing up whether to get the 11.6 inch when it drops, but the i3 processor has me a little worried. I don't need my laptop to be able to heavily game, I just need it to be able to snappily open and deal with running programs - will the i3 be able to manage this or is the 11.6 inch 9 series essentially an overpriced netbook?

For comparison's sake, I'm coming from a 3 year old Dell XPS m1330 with a 2ghz CoreDuo T7250 - i know that it's not all about ghz, but are the two processors even comparable with the technoligcal advances of the past three years or is there still a massive gap?

I just need the 11.6 inch to run things as fast as my XPS, and I watch a lot of video on the go so smooth playback is a must for me

 

You can compare the performance of the 380UM (#222) with the T7250 (#169) using notebookcheck's mobile CPU benchmark list. However, while the 380UM's single thread throughput is lower, having 2 cores running two threads each boosts overall throughput and gets close to the T7250. The latest Intel GPU also has respectable performance.

John

 

opening programs and general snappiness is a function of hard drive speed, so look there for your answer. ps, SSDs upgrades > cpu upgrades. if its NOT, you'll already know that.

 

does anyone have a review on the 11 inch? battery life? performance? Thinking about pulling the trigger on it

 

only 36gb of disk drive space........

 

Seriously?

 

You can recover some space getting rid of the bloatwares, but 36GB is more or less on target. For me, I bought a 32GB microSD card and left it in the laptop permanently as a secondary storage means. Not as elegant, but much easier and cheaper than getting a new SSD.

 

Yikes. I doubt I'd be able to deal with that.

Thanks for the info.

 

I have been comparing these as well. Samsung did release a new 11" model that has 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD which will meet more people's needs:
NP900X1B-A01US Specs

My big hangup is the lack of a TPM chip in the 11" models. Here is the full lineup as far as I can tell:

Model Screen Proc RAM Storage TPM Price
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
NP900X1A-A01US 11.6" i3 2GB 64GB No $1199
NP900X1B-A01US 11.6" i3 4GB 128GB No $1249
NP900X1B-A02US 11.6" i3 2GB 64GB No $1049
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
NP900X3A-A02US 13" i5 4GB 128GB Yes ??
NP900X3A-A03US 13" i5 4GB 128GB No $1649
NP900X3A-A04US 13" i7 8GB 128GB Yes ??
NP900X3A-A05US 13" i7 6GB 256GB Yes $2049
NP900X3A-B01US 13" i5 4GB 128GB Yes $1649
NP900X3A-B02US 13" i5 4GB 256GB Yes $1649

 

Nice table.

Fwiw, you can get an 11.6" version w/ an i5 outside the U.S. (in Korea, for sure; don't know about elsewhere, and I don't know about TPM).