Samsung 700G7C review: Samsung 700G7C

There has been a small flood of big-screened gaming mega laptops recently, timed to coincide with the release of Nvidia's latest graphics and Intel's newest processors. Ivy Bridge Core i-series CPUs started in quad-core configurations first, although midrange dual-core and ultrabook processors will follow soon. Systems showing off these new processors and graphics have largely been very expensive and, incidentally, quite good.

8.3

Samsung 700G7C

The Good

The <b>Samsung Series 7 Gamer</b> has a fantastic screen, plenty of ports, a blazing processor and graphics, and most of the features you'd be looking for in a gaming desktop replacement.

The Bad

This clunky beast isn't a looker, and it's hardly priced to be relevant to most shoppers: at slightly under $2,000, this is a specialty item.

The Bottom Line

The Samsung Series 7 Gamer is huge, expensive, and unattractive, but it's also one of the best gaming laptops that we've seen this year. If you don't mind its beefy 17-inch form, you won’t be disappointed.

Samsung's behemoth Series 7 Gamer is one of a new line of laptops for the Korean electronics giant, clearly an answer to products from the likes of Origin, Alienware, and Asus.

Big-boned and full of high-end components, the Series 7 Gamer comes in only one, $1,899 configuration. The good news is that there's a lot of meat in this laptop: a quad-core Core i7-3610QM processor, 16GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 675M graphics, a 750GB hard drive, and a 1,920x1,080-pixel-resolution 17-inch display that's flat-out gorgeous.

Yes, it's heavy (9 pounds). Yes, it's expensive (nearly $2,000). Yes, it's a little ugly. However, it's one of the best-performing laptops we've ever seen, at a price that's not that unreasonable. Samsung's entry into PC gaming laptops is a success, although it's a surprisingly bulky and flashy product for a company that's been making sleek and minimal laptops otherwise.