Product Listing

Samsung RF510 - A Fleeting Workhorse

By Andy Sim & Aloysius Low - 1 Feb 2011
Launch SRP: S$1999

Performance Benchmarking

Performance Benchmarking

You can call this a battle royale of the Core i7 clan. Three notebooks are coming into the performance fray with similar but discrete specifications. The Lenovo IdeaPad may possess a slight advantage, since it touts the slightly faster Core i7-740QM processor with a higher clock speed. They are all riding on the same HM55 chipset but sport distinct GPUs. We'd like to draw your attention to the Samsung and Dell troopers. Both machines share the same discrete graphics, but it's likely the quad-core CPU will give the Samsung notebook a slight advantage. Memory wise, the RF510 is packed with 6GB of DDR3 RAM like the Dell XPS 15. Let's see how it pans out on the benchmarks.

Specifications / Notebook Samsung RF510 Lenovo IdeaPad Y560 Dell XPS 15
Processor Intel Core i7-720QM
  (1.60GHz quad-core with 6MB L2 cache)
Intel Core i7-740QM
(1.73GHz quad-core with 6MB L2 cache)
Intel Core i5-560M
(2.53GHz quad-core with 3MB L2 cache)
Chipset Intel HM55 Intel HM55 Intel HM55
Memory 6GB DDR3 4GB DDR3 6GB DDR3
HDD 500GB SATA (5400 RPM) 750GB SATA (5400 RPM) 640GB SATA (5400 RPM)
Video NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M

 

PCMark Vantage

Futuremark's Vantage yielded rather interesting results. Judging from the numbers crunched, the RF510 was most effective on the TV and Movies suite, which makes the notebook ideal for video playback as well. What's intriguing, however, is that Samsung's laptop came out tops although it didn't feature exceptionally well for the rest of the test suites. It racked up a score of 6,083 PCMarks, versus Lenovo (5,813 PCMarks) and Dell (5,888 PCMarks). Checking out the HDD test suite revealed that it had good drive performance which In essence boosted most of the other benchmark figures, making the RF510 a splendid all-rounder when it comes to tackling your computing chores. More importantly, the RF510 was a diligent worker when it came to juggling various applications on its Windows 7 Home Premium platform. Apart from an active WiFi connection, we tried out simultaneous apps such as MS Word & Excel 2007, IE8, Windows Media Player and the MSN Chat client which we threw in for good measure. The machine didn't falter one bit. On the down side, we encountered a strange issue when the notebook awoke from its suspend mode. Only half a screen showed up, while the left portion is blank. A cold reboot resolved the glitch nonetheless.

 

 

3D Mark06

Samsung's RF-series harvested decent 3DMark results, but obviously not the best among the three notebooks. It was clearly outmatched by the IdeaPad, which touts the Radeon HD 5730 designed to handle current games ranging anywhere from medium to high settings, provided you stick with a conservative resolution. Think FIFA 11 or Mafia 2. An outcome of 7,352 3DMarks is not shoddy, by any means. And if we could put those numbers into perspective, Samsung's rig should breeze through less intensive games at medium configurations without issues. Games based on newer APIs such as OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 11 are also supported by the GT 420M by the way, but don't expect it to wow you as it's not really cut out for it in terms of performance.

Speaking of graphics and performance, we also tested its video playback performance with a 1080p H.264 clip for fifteen minutes or so. As anticipated, the RF510 worked like a charm without producing any ghosting, lags or artifacts, although we must say its display is marginally less brighter than what we've experienced with the LG R590.


 

Far Cry 2

Ubisoft's Far Cry 2 was released more than two years ago, but it's still our title of choice in helping us gauge a notebook's gaming performance. Evidently, it is less demanding than Crysis but eats up just the right hardware resources. The Samsung RF510 returned a frame rate of 51.44fps on the Medium detail setting and 30.71fps on Very High. That tells us that Far Cry 2 is definitely playable on Medium but might stutter with richer gameplay modes. Do note that our results are based on a 1024 x 768 pixels resolution for results compatibility sake. Naturally, frame rates would suffer if you prefer to run the game with a higher resolution. As a whole, Samsung's laptop did better than the Dell XPS, but still trails the IdeaPad when it comes down to crunching gaming renders.

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7.5
  • Design 7.5
  • Features 8
  • Performance 8
  • Value 7.5
  • Mobility 7
The Good
Decent Performance
Spacious & Responsive Touchpad
Excellent Keyboard
The Bad
Poor Battery Life
Expensive For Its Class
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