Ahead of CES next week, Samsung has announced two new models at the top of its PC lineup. The new Series 7 Chronos and Series 7 Ultra bring a lot of horsepower to Samsung’s lineup — they join the Series 7 Slate and Series 7 Gamer as the company’s flagship laptops, with everything now optimized and tuned for Windows 8.
Samsung’s new Series 7 laptops are souped-up Windows 8 ultrabooks
is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
The Series 7 Chronos is aimed at pros and offers up to 1TB of hard drive storage, a powerful Radeon HD 8870 graphics chip with 2GB of memory, a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, and up to 16GB of RAM in a chassis just over 20mm thick. The computer can use part of that RAM as a ramdisk to further speed things. The 5.18-pound metal laptop also has a 15.6-inch 1080p display, an optional 10-point touchscreen, and Samsung says that even with so much to power the Chronos will still get as much as 11 hours of battery life. It’s a beast, which means that even though Samsung hasn’t announced pricing we’re betting it’ll cost a pretty penny.
The Series 7 Ultra strikes a slightly more sensible balance, while still offering specs near the high-end of the ultrabook range. It has a crazy-sharp 13.3-inch 1080p display with optional touch, a Core i5 or i7 processor, a discrete AMD HD8570 GPU with 1GB of memory, and can be customized with up to 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. But it weighs only slightly over three pounds, and Samsung claims it will get eight hours of battery life. It has all the trappings of a powerful, portable machine, and can even be purchased with LTE connectivity – for the truest of road warriors. Like the Chronos, there’s no price tag attached to the Series 7 Ultra yet, but also like the Chronos you’ll probably pay for its impressive spec sheet.
As is all too common with CES launches, there’s no word on when the Series 7 Chronos or Ultra will be available, but we’ll be on hand when the show starts next week to check out the new laptops in person.
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