The 15-inch Ultrabook Samsung Galaxy Book Ion is great - but it still has some issues.

Samsung is trying to compete with lightweight Ultrabooks such as the LG Gram or the Acer Swift 5 with its Galaxy Book Ion series. The recipe is simple: a fancy exterior, a bright FullHD QLED display, a fast SSD and we're done. The smaller 13-inch version of the Ion, which we reviewed a while ago, showed a series of weaknesses that were almost all directly connected to the small form factor, although the competition seemed to have found better solutions to them. The cooling fans were simply too loud.   

After reviewing the 15.6-inch version, we can confirm that the cooling fans are no longer an issue here. They often remained turned off while idling and only became a little loud under maximum load - but that is mainly connected to the fact that Samsung has equipped our thin test unit with the dedicated GPU GeForce MX250. 

Funnily enough, the cooling system wasn't the issue. The fans are fine, as are the surface temperatures. Samsung really did a good job there. It's the latencies that are the problem. They are very strong and the CPU is fully maxed out when playing YouTube videos, which causes a number of dropped frames. We assume this is a software issue that can hopefully be solved. As it stands, the strong CPU utilization while streaming has a negative impact on battery life during our Wi-Fi browsing test. Find out what other advantages and disadvantages this $1300 MX250 Galaxy Book Ion has in our detailed review. 

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