Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Review: Sleek, Premium, Great Battery Life
Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360: Cooling, Battery Life And Our Verdict
Samsung serves up a handful of cooling and performance profiles on the Galaxy Book Pro 360, including High performance, Optimized, Silent, No fan, and Use microphone in Optimized mode. These are mostly self explanatory, but here are Samsung's descriptions for each one..
- High performance: Enable the highest performance with increased system speed. The surface temperature may rise and fan noise may increase.
- Optimized: Enabled optimized performance automatically by recognizing your environment.
- Silent: Use the system quietly by reducing fan noise.
- No fan: Use your computer without fan noise by limiting performance. The surface temperature may increase when used for a long time.
- Use microphone in Optimized mode: Measure ambient noise using a microphone.
We performed our testing in High performance mode because (A) it highlights the full performance potential of this laptop, and (B) it still ran quiet enough to make this feasible. Point B is not always a foregone conclusion. For example, in our Alienware m17 R4 review, we pointed out that we kept the laptop in Balanced mode, as it shipped, because the Full Speed and Performance modes were noisy enough that most people would probably avoid using them.
That was not the case here. Most of the time, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 runs either silent or extremely quiet. It doesn't emit much noise in most cases, regardless of the task or overall load.
When we fired up Furmark and Prime95 simultaneously, the fans eventually kicked on and ramped up, but still kept the noise at polite levels. At its 'loudest', our noise meter typically registered between 42-46 decibels. Additionally, the chassis never got so hot to the touch that it hurt our skin. An imprecise test, sure, but we've touched some seriously hot laptops before (usually gaming ones with high powered discrete GPUs).
Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Battery Life Test
We run a custom 1080p HD video loop test developed in-house, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours has been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average laptop this is somewhere between a 40-60 percent brightness setting. In the case of the Galaxy Book Pro 360, this required lowering the brightness to 51 percent on the slider in the Windows 10 sidebar.
For some people, we saved the best benchmark result for last—battery life. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 kept chugging along with our home-brewed battery test for more than a full work day, lasting 10 hours and 31 minutes before it finally called it quits. The only laptop we've ever tested that lasted longer is Lenovo's IdeaPad Slim 7, which petered out at 10 hours and 58 minutes.
No, that's not the 20 hours Samsung claims, but no laptop manages to survive our battery drain test for the full length of time the manufacturer rates it for. And most don't last for an 8-hour shift, let alone more than 10 hours or run time. Samsung chose a bigger battery (68Wh) over sacrificing performance, and the winner of that decision is the consumer who needs a long-lasting workhorse.
Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 Review Wrap-Up
Samsung makes some of the best smartphones on the planet, and it took some of the lessons it has learned in that space and expertly applied them to the Galaxy Book Pro 360, a premium laptop with a subtly attractive design. It's exceptionally thin, it's light, and it offers some neat amenities, like a hidden magnet in the lid to grip onto the included S-Pen. Which, as we mentioned (for those of you who skipped straight to this page), works with Samsung's Galaxy smartphones. All of them, by the way, not just the Galaxy Note series.
It's often said that a worker is only as good as their tools. In that regard, Intel deserves some credit here. Much of what we like about this laptop is at least partially the result of Intel's Evo platform. Laptops like this one that bear the Evo badge have to meet a certain set of requirements that dictate performance and functionality thresholds. These apply to both the system components and form factor.
It's a blueprint for success, though not all Evo laptops are created equal. One of the criteria is battery life. This is where the Galaxy Book Pro 360 shines, offering all-day battery life and then some. Your mileage will obviously vary, of course—you could see less, or you could conceivably squeeze multiple days of usage out of a single charge, in more casual workloads.
Performance is very good here as well. In almost every benchmark we ran, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 performed at or near the top of its class. And though this is not a gaming laptop, the Xe graphics on the Core i7-1165G7 can handle some game play, as we saw in both 3DMark's Night Raid test and Gears Tactics.
The icing on the cake is that on top of everything the Galaxy Book Pro 360 does well, it runs quiet, too. Even when strained, it never gets annoyingly loud. We also found we could actually use it on our laps for an extended period of time without feeling like we were roasting our thighs. On top of that, the machine is currently on-sale as well, bringing its street price down to nearly $1100 as of this writing.
Our complaints are few and far between. It would be nice if Samsung offered more fine grain customization options when ordering one of these laptops, and the speakers, despite the AKG branding, are merely serviceable. And in if you're not invested in the Galaxy ecosystem, you may find the copious preloaded software to be annoying (though none of those apps load at startup, so kudos for that).
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