Samsung X460-44P

Samsung X460: Thin, Light, Feels Right

Welcome back, Samsung. You've been laying low in the U.S. market when it comes to notebooks, but after kicking the tires on the X460, I can honestly say you were missed. I mean, you manage to craft a 14.1-inch thin-and-light all-purpose notebook that's perfectly road-ready and goes toe-to-toe with Lenovo's ThinkPad X300--even though the X300 is an ultraportable-class machine.

That's right, I'm leaning more towards comparing this all-purpose laptop with a notebook in a lighter class than with other all-purpose models thanks to its design. You see, this is basically a Samsung X360 with upgraded parts (a slightly larger screen and a discrete GPU). It's even smartly priced considering what's on the table; our review unit goes for $1699.

That money buys you solid performance in the form of a 2.26-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, 3GB of RAM, and a discrete GPU. Although the GPU is no powerhouse--it's a 256MB nVidia GeForce 9200M GS--it certainly gives you better graphics performance than many thin-and-light machines. In games, it could handle only 49 frames per second in Doom 3 (at 1024 by 768 resolution) and 70 fps in Far Cry. Numbers like those make me wish Samsung had followed the route of the new MacBooks, which sport the GeForce 9400M GS chips. At least that way you could play a game that came out in the past two years. The X460's processing power and battery life shine a bit more brightly; in our PC World Test Center WorldBench 6 tests, it hit a very respectable 93, while its battery ran for a nice, long 4.5-hour stretch.