 Hey, I'm Nate Roth with The Verge and we are checking out the Samsung Series 7 Gamer. Now this thing is big. It's got a 17.3 inch display with a 1920 by 1080 resolution. That's going to be good for your general gaming needs, but it also makes the machine really heavy. It's about 9.6 pounds and you're going to have to keep it tethered too because the battery life is pretty poor. We got about three and a half hours on the Verge battery test. So the Series 7 Gamer sports a full size keyboard which is kind of expected on a machine this big and it's also really appreciated. The keys are traditional scissor style laptop keys. Now there is backlighting on this keyboard but the options are kind of limited. Samsung lets you have blue and white. Some other highlights on the hardware end are the speakers which are pretty good. There's a subwoofer underneath the machine so the machine has a little more oomph, a little more bass than we can expect from a lot of laptops. Now the port selection on the Series 7 Gamer is pretty standard. You've got your power adapter, your gigabit ethernet port, a VGA port, HDMI and DisplayPort, a pair of USB 3.0 ports and there's the card reader up above that and then your headphone and microphone jacks. On the opposite side we've got another pair of USB 2.0 ports, there's a Blu-ray drive and then there's the mode switch. There are four modes to choose from. Right now we're in gaming mode but we can switch down to balanced mode, library mode and eco mode. Now these are essentially glorified power plans. In eco mode the screen is dimmed and the power on the CPU is throttled down to give you the maximum possible battery life. Library mode is designed for when you're inside of a library. In addition to dimming the screen a bit it actually cuts powers to the fans and throttles the CPU so the machine doesn't make too much noise. Balanced mode is your typical PC's balanced mode, it's kind of a nice middle ground and then there's gaming mode which I suspect most people will keep the machine locked to. When you fire up gaming mode a small widget appears on the top right corner of the screen and it lets you choose between three different themes. The themes are kind of over the top and ridiculous but they change the wallpaper and add a nifty little wallpaper themed screensaver to each mode which is kind of pointless but in the best possible way. Samsung's series 7 gamer is pretty fast. Under the hood is a 2.3GHz Core i7 3610 QM processor, 16GB of RAM and about 1.5TB of hard drive space. Most of the Ivy Bridge laptops we've seen recently include a 32GB mSATA solid state cache drive. Samsung opted instead to use an 8GB Express cache. You're going to see a performance hit to things like how fast your application runs or the boot speed. It also allows Samsung to stick about 1.5TB of storage space in here in the form of two 750GB hard drives. The gaming performance is pretty good. The machine is running an Nvidia GeForce GTX 675M. It's not the fastest GPU on the market right now but it's a pretty strong contender. We got a smooth 29 frames per second on Battlefield 3 on Ultra. If you dial the settings down to high you'll see about 41 frames per second. But it feels pretty good. The action is smooth for the most part. When you get into some of the more intense firefights in the game you might notice a bit of slowdown. You can fix that pretty easily by dialing down the anti-aliasing settings or even switching to high in Battlefield 3 which still makes the game look fairly gorgeous. If you're in the market for a mid-range gaming machine the Samsung Series 7 Gamer will not disappoint. It makes some compromises in the performance and the battery life and there might be some qualms about the particular hard drive arrangement. But for $1900 it's a pretty solid deal. If you're willing to spend a little more you're going to want to check out the Alienware M17X. It's going to cost you an extra $700 but you'll get much better frame rates, slightly better battery life and a better performance overall.
 Hey, I'm Nate Roth with The Verge and we are checking out the Samsung Series 7 Gamer.
 Now this thing is big.
 It's got a 17.3 inch display with a 1920 by 1080 resolution.
 That's going to be good for your general gaming needs, but it also makes the machine really
 heavy.
 It's about 9.6 pounds and you're going to have to keep it tethered too because the battery
 life is pretty poor.
 We got about three and a half hours on the Verge battery test.
 So the Series 7 Gamer sports a full size keyboard which is kind of expected on a machine this
 big and it's also really appreciated.
 The keys are traditional scissor style laptop keys.
 Now there is backlighting on this keyboard but the options are kind of limited.
 Samsung lets you have blue and white.
 Some other highlights on the hardware end are the speakers which are pretty good.
 There's a subwoofer underneath the machine so the machine has a little more oomph, a
 little more bass than we can expect from a lot of laptops.
 Now the port selection on the Series 7 Gamer is pretty standard.
 You've got your power adapter, your gigabit ethernet port, a VGA port, HDMI and DisplayPort,
 a pair of USB 3.0 ports and there's the card reader up above that and then your headphone
 and microphone jacks.
 On the opposite side we've got another pair of USB 2.0 ports, there's a Blu-ray drive
 and then there's the mode switch.
 There are four modes to choose from.
 Right now we're in gaming mode but we can switch down to balanced mode, library mode
 and eco mode.
 Now these are essentially glorified power plans.
 In eco mode the screen is dimmed and the power on the CPU is throttled down to give you the
 maximum possible battery life.
 Library mode is designed for when you're inside of a library.
 In addition to dimming the screen a bit it actually cuts powers to the fans and throttles
 the CPU so the machine doesn't make too much noise.
 Balanced mode is your typical PC's balanced mode, it's kind of a nice middle ground and
 then there's gaming mode which I suspect most people will keep the machine locked to.
 When you fire up gaming mode a small widget appears on the top right corner of the screen
 and it lets you choose between three different themes.
 The themes are kind of over the top and ridiculous but they change the wallpaper and add a nifty
 little wallpaper themed screensaver to each mode which is kind of pointless but in the
 best possible way.
 Samsung's series 7 gamer is pretty fast.
 Under the hood is a 2.3GHz Core i7 3610 QM processor, 16GB of RAM and about 1.5TB of
 hard drive space.
 Most of the Ivy Bridge laptops we've seen recently include a 32GB mSATA solid state
 cache drive.
 Samsung opted instead to use an 8GB Express cache.
 You're going to see a performance hit to things like how fast your application runs or the
 boot speed.
 It also allows Samsung to stick about 1.5TB of storage space in here in the form of two
 750GB hard drives.
 The gaming performance is pretty good.
 The machine is running an Nvidia GeForce GTX 675M.
 It's not the fastest GPU on the market right now but it's a pretty strong contender.
 We got a smooth 29 frames per second on Battlefield 3 on Ultra.
 If you dial the settings down to high you'll see about 41 frames per second.
 But it feels pretty good.
 The action is smooth for the most part.
 When you get into some of the more intense firefights in the game you might notice a
 bit of slowdown.
 You can fix that pretty easily by dialing down the anti-aliasing settings or even switching
 to high in Battlefield 3 which still makes the game look fairly gorgeous.
 If you're in the market for a mid-range gaming machine the Samsung Series 7 Gamer will not
 disappoint.
 It makes some compromises in the performance and the battery life and there might be some
 qualms about the particular hard drive arrangement.
 But for $1900 it's a pretty solid deal.
 If you're willing to spend a little more you're going to want to check out the Alienware M17X.
 It's going to cost you an extra $700 but you'll get much better frame rates, slightly better
 battery life and a better performance overall.