Samsung Galaxy Book2 15 review - Multimedia laptop with Arc A350M fails to impress ^↺

The Samsung Galaxy Book2 15 uses the same chassis as its predecessor, but it is now only available in a graphite color scheme. The device has a very clean look without any striking elements. And its smooth surfaces are quite sensitive to fingerprints. However, the 15.6-inch laptop, which is made of plastic and aluminum, fails to impress in terms of quality. Our review unit makes unpleasant creaking sounds. The lid area in particular is severely affected by this problem, but the base unit isn't spared either.

We also have an issue with its level of sturdiness. For example, the keyboard flexes noticeably when pushed and we are also able to quite easily distort the image on the display. In addition, although the screen hinge lets you open up the display to a 180° angle, it also exhibits a significant amount of teetering. Overall, the laptop doesn't feel at all like a product with a list price of 1,300 Euros (US$1,300).

Weighing slightly under 1.6 kg (3.5 lb), the Galaxy Book2 is one of the lightest and most compact laptops amongst the devices in our comparison. Samsung ships the device with a compact 65-watt wall charger that weighs just 183 g (0.4 lb) with the USB-C cable.

The laptop has a good selection of modern USB-C ports, regular USB-A ports, and an HDMI output. This means that you will be fine using the laptop without an external hub or adapter. However, Samsung doesn't include USB 4 or Thunderbolt, which limits the use of the device with docking stations.

On the right, there is a microSD card reader that is connected internally via USB 2.0. Consequently, the card reader was only able to transfer data at speeds of up to 26 MB/s with our reference card (Angelbird AV Pro V60).

Even though Samsung didn't include a Wi-Fi 6E module (6 GHz), the laptop still comes with the Intel AX201, which is an excellent Wi-Fi module that supports Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax, 2x2). During testing with our ASUS reference router, data transfer rates were outstanding at around 1.6 Gbit/s and also very stable. The laptop also supports Bluetooth 5.1 but doesn't have an LTE or 5G module.

The webcam located at the top of the bezel only uses a 720p sensor. Whilst it gets the job done, the image quality isn't great even under good lighting conditions. There is neither a mechanical webcam cover nor an IR camera for Windows Hello face authentication.

Samsung offers three different power modes that you can select in the Samsung Settings app or by pressing Fn+F11 on the laptop. In the table below, we have listed the TDP values of the processor and graphics card under constant load for each of the modes. Fundamentally, both the CPU and GPU were able to take advantage of the higher TDP values at the beginning of the tests, but only for a very short period.

When you look at these values and consider that the Core i7-1260P is an Alder Lake-P chip with a nominal TDP of 28 watts, it is rather disappointing that the system greatly falls short of this nominal TDP even when it is only under CPU load and is running in high-performance mode. We ran the following benchmarks and measurements in High Performance mode in order to at least get the best performance the laptop has to offer.

The Core i7-1260P is part of Intel's current-gen Alder Lake family, which uses a hybrid architecture that combines performance and efficiency cores. The Core i7-1260P features four high-speed performance cores (8 threads) and eight efficiency cores (8 threads), meaning it is able to run up to 16 threads in parallel. Intel caps the maximum power consumption of Alder Lake-P chips at 64 watts. But as we've already seen, the chips themselves don't even hit their maximum clock speed with that amount of power. Nonetheless, the new chips still perform very well at high power usage, even if they aren't the most efficient.

Looking at the TDP values of the Samsung Galaxy Book2 15, you can already imagine that its processor is going to perform significantly worse. In any case, power management still really needs some optimization because results can fluctuate drastically. For instance, we obtained scores between about 7,800 and 10,200 points in Cinebench R23 Multi without any difference in the procedure. In addition, we noticed that the processor only seems to be able to make use of the full 35 watts when running current benchmarks such as Cinebench R23 and R20. Even then, performance still fluctuates frequently.

As expected, the single-core performance is very good. On battery power, its performance likewise fluctuated significantly with a power draw of 13-20 watts. Generally, you can expect a deficit of around 30%. More CPU benchmarks are available on this page.

Despite the low TDP values of the Core i7-1260P, the Galaxy Book2 15 is still a highly responsive laptop thanks in part to its PCIe SSD. We didn't encounter any issues during our review. Results from the synthetic benchmarks are good. Nonetheless, we are going to be somewhat cautious here because the driver for the new Arc A350M GPU is very highly optimized for benchmarks.