Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra review

Computer games are not what you would call a economical hobby. A thousand units of your local currency won’t be enough when the venerable red fog lifts and you start down the path of obsessively acquiring CPU cores, TFLOPS, and always, always bigger numbers. And if you plan to spend more than three thousand of these currency units, you will be expecting something extremely unique.

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra costs over three thousand units, regardless of whether it is valued in dollars, pounds or euros. Its prices are comparable to the MacBook Pro and Predator Helios 18, and while it’s distasteful to talk about money while I could rave about the frame rate, the plain fact is that if you’re only interested in bezels, go for the latest version from MSI, Asus or any of the usual suspects where you’ll find things more to your taste.

The Galaxy Book4 Ultra isn’t a gaming laptop at all, it just kind of looks like one. Although skinny. The combination of Core Ultra 9 (Meteor Lake, 16 cores total) and GeForce RTX 4070 certainly makes it useful in this area, and the 16-inch AMOLED touchscreen with 3K resolution and 120Hz is a stunning thing to look at it’s worth a look, but it comes with RTX Studio drivers installed (there’s a sticker just under the keyboard) indicating its intended apply in the imaginative arts.

Switching to Game Ready drivers, however, is a matter of a few clicks in GeForce Experience or the newer Nvidia app, after which it becomes essentially comparable to any other RTX 4070-equipped laptop.

However, there is some confusion about the power drawn by the GPU – the box says 70W, while a software check shows it is slightly higher than 80W. Whichever is true, it’s half ( or thereabouts) of what you can get from machines like the Razer Blade 14 or MSI Vector 17 HX, which apply 140W RTX 4070 chips, and the test results prove it.

Consider the Time Spy Extreme benchmark, where the Galaxy Book GPU scores 3,426 points. Sounds good until you look at the Lenovo Legion LOQ 15APH8, which has an RTX 4050 running at 95W and scores 4,105 points. It also only costs $1,100.

Razer Blade 14 manages 5634; The MSI Vector 17 HX scores a staggering 6,102 and retails for $2,299. What about a decent game? In Cyberpunk 2077, the Galaxy Book had difficulty getting playable frame rates at Ultra Ray-Tracing settings (yes, I know you can lower the settings, but that’s Computer gamer) generating 24fps at 1080p resolution, 10fps slower than the RTX 4060 in the Legion Pro 5i 16 Gen 9. This happens repeatedly in tests, with cheaper laptops leaving the pricey Samsung in the dust.

So what makes the Galaxy Book stand out and justify its high price? Well, you get 32GB of swift LPDDR5X storage and a 2TB SSD that delivers higher average throughput than many other laptops. It’s also possible to downgrade the device to save some money, but for the money you get an exceptionally nicely built laptop.

It comes from the slim, sleek and high-end aluminum school of design, which means the Samsung logo on the lid reflects a rainbow as if someone built it from an oily puddle on a shining day, and the keyboard has solid white backlighting instead of unicorn vomit RGB. A pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, USB Type-A, a headset jack, and a MicroSD card slot make it as well-equipped for gaming on the go as it is for connecting an external 4K screen and shouting into the microphone.

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It’s sturdy, the hinges are silky and you don’t feel even a hint of flex even when you hold it by the corner and try to apply the trackpad, which can ruin some less well-made laptops. It turns on automatically when you open the lid, which is a bit annoying when you just want to check if there’s a sliding cover over the camera (there isn’t, but at least it has a 1080p sensor), while still being very handy and capable – a feeling when you really need to apply from the Book.

You also get a fingerprint reader you can apply to log in, which always seems more like a sci-fi authentication method than facial recognition. One day we’ll scan ourselves (or the extracted eyeball of the scientist we just chloroformed) with a webcam, but until then this will do.

The combination of Core Ultra’s low-power cores and lower GPU power ratings allows the Book 4 Ultra to achieve outstanding battery life. Under test conditions (locked in a closet where there is no noticeable flickering), the laptop lasted almost 13 hours in a test where the screen was on (at 50% brightness) while running a loop of video and office applications. This test doesn’t give the GeForce chip much trouble, and in a simulated gaming benchmark that allows it to stretch its legs a bit more, it ran for 2 hours 13 minutes.

That’s a less than perfect result, even in the age of gaming laptops that can barely handle enough charge to keep them alive between power sockets. The Book 4 Ultra isn’t a particularly bulky device and has less space to hide battery cells than thicker models, so perhaps it relies on component performance rather than a vast battery to ensure longer life. The moral of the story is that if you’re playing, you need to plug it in.

There are also some Samsung-specific features, such as the ability to connect to your Galaxy smartphone in a more intimate way than standard Windows Phone Link, such as using it as a wireless video camera during meetings. They have absolutely no impact on your gaming experience, but are still a nice quality of life improvement, even if the constant nagging of creating and logging into a Samsung account has you launching the Settings app to uninstall everything.

And that’s pretty much where the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra ends. It’s pricey, it’s not amazing for gaming, despite what the specs may tell you (though that’s not an exaggeration). Did I mention it’s pricey? But it’s an incredibly easy-to-use machine, and if you envy MacBooks’ sleek looks, piercing screens, and long battery life, this is about as close as you can get without sacrificing Windows.