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Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3: Small, But Noisy

A good-looking and small but also loud notebook: Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3
A good-looking and small but also loud notebook: Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3
Samsung's Galaxy Book Ion 13.3 is a decent laptop that needs some additional fine-tuning, particularly regarding fan noise.

Visually, the Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3 is fairly similar to Apple’s MacBook Pro, but it is also significantly lighter at the same time thanks to its magnesium case. At just 970 g it is very light, and it ran for 9.5 hours in our Wi-Fi test and thus offers a good battery life to boot.

Granted, system performance is somewhat slower than it could be by the thermal throttling CPU, but it is still more than adequate for most office applications, simple photo editing purposes, and browsing the web. A fast SSD and up to 16 GB of dual-channel RAM are very other immensely important factors.

As Loud as the Fans Sound

Our review unit featured the slower of the two CPU options, an Intel Core i5-10210U. It offered adequate performance at a very high level of noise. The Galaxy Book Ion 13.3 was silent only immediately after powering up the system. As soon as you launch an application, say a web browser, the fan will start spinning and never stop again.

We are thus very curious how the faster of the two CPU options, the Core i7-10510U, would perform. Given the already very limited performance we would not expect any improvements on this front and would most likely expect an even more aggressive fan due to the more powerful CPU. Let’s hope that Samsung will address this issue in a future software update because otherwise, the Galaxy Book Ion 13.3 seems to be a very capable and good notebook.

Find out how well the Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3 did in our extensive review.

Source(s)

  Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3 Notebookcheck review

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > Reviews > Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3: Small, But Noisy
Mike Wobker, 2020-07-28 (Update: 2020-07-28)