I got a new Samsung X20 Notebook recently and as promised, I'm sharing a few impressions for the European and Asian SPCR readers (Samsung notebooks are not sold in America).
Overall Quality and Handling
I'm very pleased with the quality and style of the notebook. At 2.4kg it's not too heavy; it's thin and good looking; the plasic parts are high quality; and I haven't found any majour flaws in ergonomy.
The screen
The screen is very good (I got the SXGA+ version). Colors are nice and brightness at the maximum setting is excellent. Viewing angles are ok (not superb), as long as one does not try to view the screen from below. There are some very minor flaws in the uniformity of the backlight, but that's only visible for some uniform colors covering the whole screen (like my windows background
). Keep in mind that I have not had the chance to carefully look at other notebook screens, and my reference are the LCD panels for desktop machines I worked with (ViewSonic VX2000 and LG Flatron L1920P).The keyboard / Touchpad
It's superb! I just bought two Logitech UltraX keyboards for my main rigs, and was actually disappointed, because I expected them to be as good as the one on the Samsung X20. The notebook keyboard is very silent (none of the UltraX rattling of the keys), and most comfortable to use. A nice pressure point, much like the UltraX, but its softer at the end of the travel, when the key bottoms out, giving it a damped feeling.
The touchpad is responsive and exact. The scrollbar works in many applications and is most useful. And between the right and left "mouse"-button there is a button to switch the pad off for continuous typing (to avoid touching it accidentally). The only minor gripe are the buttons, which emit a very cheap plasticky sound - about the only component on the notebook that doesn't have a high-quality feel to it.
The harddrive
It's a Samsung MP0804H 5400rpm 80GB drive. I haven't done any benchmarks and don't feel the need to. It's certainly responsive enough for office use (that's all I do with that laptop). It's not silent. Seeks are audible but not too intrusive. But the idle noise could be better. This might be caused by the fact that right above the drive, in the right corner closest to the user, there is an opening in the case for a speaker. And the HD idle noise has thus a direct path to the ear. It has a benign quality, mostly broadband woosh originally, but narrowed in frequency to the mid-range by the case. There is a very faint metallic high-pitch component. Vibrations from the HD can be felt touching any part of the notebook.
All in all it's not too bad, though. Just not silent.
The fan
The fan is temperature controlled and has at least four speed states: off, low, medium and high. There might be even higher speed states that I haven't managed to trigger with my model with shared-memory graphics. There are two sets of temperatures to trigger these states, the "standard" mode and the "etiquette" mode. Threshold temperatures are somewhat painful to measure as there also seem to be time delays before switching the speed, but it's something like this:
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standard etiquette
off->low N/A (fan never off) 47°C
low->med 53°C 62°C
med->high 58°C N/AThe fan speeds are chosen well, as the "low" setting has the fan at about the same noise level as the idle noise from the harddrive, and thus doesn't add much to overall noise. Undervolting the CPU prevents the fan from ever switching to the medium or high speeds, which are not quiet. Quality of the fan noise is essentially air turbulence, I didn't make out any motor or bearing noise at low speed.
Battery life
I don't have any software to test this. But putting the screen at 25% (the lowest that's useable for longer continuous work), working non-stop in Powerpoint (frequent saves, HD not set to spin down), no WiFi, CPU undervolted, running at 800MHz/0.7V most of the time, I got a little over 4.5hrs out of the standard capacity battery supplied. Note that setting the screen a notch brighter (3/8 ) does make it almost comfortable to work, depending on the environment. I don't know yet how much battery that costs.
Miscellaneous
The memory used are 2x256MB of PC2-3200. I feel Samsung is a bit greedy on this, as PC2-4200 would have been more adequate. I don't know the memory timings. And a single stick of memory would have helped increase battery life, with appearently negligible performance loss in real-life applications.
The optical drive works, what else can I say? It's LOUD at full speed, like any optical drive. For reading DVD's it's unobtrusive.
Warranty: Samsung is not clear on this. I bought the notebook in Germany but live in France. Samsung advertises in Germany a 24-month PickUp&Return warranty for every major city in Europe, but upon inquiry state that the information on the Website is not up-to-date, no PickUp&Return outside Germany. With the notebook came a leaflet with terms of a warranty for 1 year. Upon further inquiry, warranty is 2 years in Germany, the terms sent with the notebook are not up-to-date either!!!! I'm still waiting for the real terms and conditions of the warranty I actually have and which they promised to send...
Summary
I bought this for mobile office use and had a hard time finding a reasonably powerful and lightweight 15" notebook with good battery life (e.g. no fast graphics card wanted) and a good non-reflecting screen (the recent Sony-style shiny screens may be good for watching movies in a dark room but for working in a train they must be a nightmare). IBMs could have fit the bill in terms of performance, but financially they most certainly would not have fit it... The Samsung X20 does indeed fit the bill and I must say that I am very happy with my decision. This is a powerful, stylish, and reasonably quiet notebook (with some tweaking of CPU voltages). The components all seem to be high quality (except for the touchpad buttons), and it's nice to work with.
PS
Finally, I'll have to say a word about the software I use to undervolt: Centrino Hardware Control. It lets you chose different modes of operation (analogous to those defined in Windows): max battery, dynamic switching and max performance. The nice thing is, you get to set custom voltages at each multiplier, somewhat like ChrystalCPUID. But it works better, since it keeps overwriting the multiplier and voltage settings at regular intervals, which ChrystalCPUID didn't. Thus, I don't need to set the Windows drivers to "max performance" to keep them from interfering. It also has some limited capability of built-in stress testing after changes to CPU voltages. The interface is very polished, the soft shows CPU and HD temperatures, can be used to set HD spindown parameters (and power management on drives that support it), can set fan temperature threshold on some notebooks (not this one), controls ATI graphics power saving parameters, etc. Highly recommended!
These are the voltages I use on my Pentium-M 730:
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Multiplier Freq. [MHz] Vcore [V]
6 800 0.700
8 1066 0.780
9 1200 0.812
10 1333 0.876
11 1466 0.924
12 1600 0.972