Samsung Galaxy Book S Laptop Review: Lakefield with initial problems

The ports are identical to the ARM version of the Galaxy Book S. There is a USB-C port on each side (USB 3.1 Gen.1 w/ DisplayPort-Alt), which can also be used to charge the laptop. You also get a 3.5 mm stereo jack and a microSD reader.

The maximum transfer rate in combination with our reference card from Toshiba (Exceria Pro M501 64 GB UHS-II) is 82.4 MB/s, so it is identical with the ARM model. The average transfer rate when you copy pictures is a bit lower at 63.9 MB/s.

Samsung does not ship the German model with an LTE modem, so one major advantage of the ARM SKU is gone. In return, customers get a slightly faster Wi-Fi 6 module from Intel (AX200), but the transfer rates in combination with our Netgear router (Nighthawk AX12) are below our expectations. The results are better compared to the ARM Galaxy Book S, but most users will probably not notice the difference.

The input devices are identical to the recently reviewed ARM model. Our test unit in Earthy Gold, however, does not have a green keyboard illumination, but a white one. The basic issue is still the same though, because the backlight is controlled by a sensor, which is sitting in the lower right display bezel. The sensor will only activate the illumination when it is almost pitch black, and we could not activate it in dim environments. The visibility of the keyboard is not perfect due to the color, either, and we would have wanted a manual control in many situations. The illumination could also be a bit stronger. Samsung should definitely fix this issue.

A quick look at the specs suggests that Samsung uses the same 1080p touchscreen, and our measurement results are also very similar for the most part, but there are two important differences: The Intel SKU supports the so called Outdoor+ mode, which increases the brightness to ~650 cd/m². We cannot detect any PWM flickering, either, which was the case on the ARM Galaxy Book S. Therefore, it seems to be a different panel (we could not find out the exact panel-ID on the ARM model). Similar to the ARM model, the subjective picture impression is very good. The integrated brightness sensor only controls the keyboard illumination; the screen brightness cannot be adjusted automatically.

Note: Samsung says that the Outdoor+ mode will increase the brightness significantly, which also increases the power consumption. The Outdoor+ mode is also automatically deactivated when you turn off the screen or when you close the lid, for example. You always have to activate the mode manually, so we use the results without the Outdoor+ mode for our rating (for both the power consumption and the battery runtime).

The small sRGB color gamut is almost covered completely, in combination with the low color deviations you can also use the display to edit pictures/videos in the small color space. We also checked the screen with the Outdoor+ mode, and the much higher brightness does not impact the subjective picture quality. The black value suffers a bit, but the overall contrast ratio is still around 1200:1.

The Core i5-L16G7 is Intel's first hybrid processor and combines four efficient Atom cores (Tremont cores, 10 nm, up to 2.8 GHz Boost) with a fast Sunny Cove core (10 nm, up to 3.0 GHz), which is also used for the current Ice Lake CPUs. Hyperthreading is not supported, so each core can only execute one thread. Please see our tech section for more details on the architecture. 

The operating system decides how the load is distributed among the cores, but applications have to support the hybrid processor as well in order to utilize the fast core. The results of our initial benchmarks were pretty sobering, because the fast Sunny Cove core was not really utilized. So we were basically dealing with a quad-core Atom processor. You can use the Task manager to assign the faster core for a specific process, but this is not suitable in practice. The Cinebench R15 single-core test was improved from 88 to 111 points (+26%) when we manually selected the faster Sunny Cove core.

Cinebench R20 is a good example for the support of applications (see screenshots below). Version 20.040 cannot utilize the fast core effectively; we can see that 5 threads are executed, but the fifth core does not see much load. This changes with version 20.060, where all cores are fully utilized.

The integrated graphics adapter is basically the fast G7-iGPU we know from the Ice Lake processors. Because of the low TDP, however, the core clock is much lower. The performance in the synthetic is more comparable to the old Intel UHD Graphics 620.

The iGPU is well-suited for everyday situation, and the video decoder has no problems with the playback of high-resolution videos.

Gaming is not great on the Galaxy Book S. The graphics performance drops after a little while (Fire Strike stress test not passed at 82%) and even simple titles hardly reach playable frame rates, which is also a result of the low CPU performance. You should focus on very simple titles from the Windows Store (like card games, for example).

The surface temperatures are pretty interesting, because they are significantly lower compared to the ARM based Galaxy Book S. We can only measure 40 °C (104 °F) at the bottom at one spot, all the other measurement spots are much cooler. This begs the question why Samsung has reduced the TDP of the processor; the surface temperatures still have some headroom.

We were not able to see the GPU clock during the stress test. The CPU cores are clearly below the 1 GHz mark and you see that Prime95 is not optimized for the hybrid processor.