Samsung RF711 review

Samsung's laptops have always had a refined look, and the RF711 is no exception. The glossy lid has a translucent starburst effect which is eye-catching, and it opens up to a two-tone keyboard panel that reminded us of one of Sony's Vaio designs. A silver panel above and to the right of the keyboard contains the power button as well as a networking toggle button and volume controls. Build quality is good, with little flex in the lid and none in the case.

One of the highlights is the Intel Core i7-2630QM processor, running at 2GHz. That may seem a bit slow, until you consider that the Core i7 supports Turbo Boost, which can automatically overclock the chip to a maximum of 2.9GHz. It's also a quad-core chip and is paired with 6GB of memory, so it's great at multitasking, and its score of 74 overall mean it's quite capable of running most applications, including video-editing and 3D-modelling software.

There's also a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 540M graphics card, which helped the RF711 to a score of 40fps in Call of Duty 4. This is fine but at the screen's native resolution of 1,600x900, the score dropped to 32fps, which is only just playable. Support for CUDA means you'll also benefit from speedier operations in GPU-accelerated applications such as the latest version of Photoshop.